


Much Too Far To Go Alone

by dracoisalooker76



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 02:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6592534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracoisalooker76/pseuds/dracoisalooker76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We all get addicted by something that takes away the pain" (Belle Aurora). Modern AU. Grey's Anatomy Inspired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Much Too Far To Go Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Hi Everyone! I know this is probably the last thing anyone wants to see from me, but this story demanded to be written. I was hoping that getting this done and out of my hands would allow me to focus on the two stories that I really need to finish – Girls and Anywhere. 
> 
> What I really wanted to do with this was focus on Haymitch/Johanna/Finnick’s pre-THG storylines with a modern day twist. I also really wanted a Grey’s Anatomy inspired fic. Thus, this happened. Originally I wrote it as my submission to F4LLS; now it is reworked. If you read the original you'll see some overlap, but there are some major differences.
> 
> It’s not Everlark, I know. There’s a moment or two in there if you squint, but this story really centers on Haymitch, Finnick, and Johanna. I hope some of you find it interesting, despite the fact that this isn’t the popular story format.
> 
> For those of you who watch Grey’s, you’ll see some parallels. So as not to ruin it, I’ll put in quotes and scenes from the show at the bottom. 
> 
> Warnings: Major character death, references to alcoholism. I think that’s all.
> 
> Title comes from "Unarmed" sung by Mariah McManus.
> 
> Enjoy.

“There’s a reason surgeons learn to wield scalpels. We like to pretend we’re hard, cold scientists. We like to pretend we’re fearless. But the truth is we become surgeons because somewhere deep down we think we can cut away that which haunts us. Weakness, frailty, death.”

-Dr. Meredith Grey, _Grey’s Anatomy (4x05, Haunt You Every Day)_

* * *

 The rain in Seattle is almost unbearable. When he started, they all said he’d get used to it. _You know_ , they had said, _just like those winters were normal to you in Boston, the rain will seem natural. You won’t even realize it’s coming down._ He had believed them, mostly as a survival mechanism. He had the next seven years as a resident to be stuck in the Seattle rain, but now after more than two decades to get used to it he knew better.

 

He’s fairly certain he would have taken the “Snowmageddon” over this crap. He hears from old classmates still in Boston that the absurd amount of snow that fell in February isn’t gone months later.

 

It’s almost as if the sky opens up. The rain comes down in thick sheets where only fog once lingered and he can barely see despite his windshield wipers flying at max speed. He turns on his internal autopilot and tries not to think about how awful the rain makes him feel. There is a reason they choose rainy days as backdrops to sad scenes in film. It’s depressing.

 

Someone parked in his usual spot and he circles the lot for another vacant place semi-near the entrance. It’s coming down so hard that he even runs like a fool to the doors – and he’s still soaked.

 

He goes in through Emergency, which is the closest door to the parking lot, and nods to the group of nurses at the station. He peeks his head into the bay to see if there’s anything interesting and spots his fifth year resident almost instantly.

 

Dr. Finnick Odair will make a fine neurosurgeon one day – but he has no plans to say that to his face any time soon.

 

He walks up to him and snatches the notes out of Finnick’s hand. His eyes skim the record and grunts.

 

“Soccer practice? In this weather?”

 

Finnick grabs it back and glares at him. “Indoor soccer.” He begins walking toward curtain four. “Aren’t you supposed to have the day off anyway, Haymitch?”

 

Haymitch follows him over to the curtain and grunts again. “Update me on the patient.”

 

“A. I’m not your intern anymore,” Finnick says. “You missed that boat by four years. B. You’re supposed to be sitting on a couch with a rifle trying to scare the shit out of some teenage ball of hormones.”

 

Haymitch goes to open his mouth and Finnick cuts him off. “You told me, explicitly by the way, that if you were still at the hospital past noon today to personally find a replacement surgeon and to escort you out of the building, but if I’m being a hundred percent honest–” he smirks “–these scrubs are made of the highest quality cotton and I’m afraid to get them wet.”

 

“You’re a cocky son-of-a-bitch, Odair,” Haymitch says.

 

“I learned from the best.”

 

Haymitch grabs the notes and pulls open the curtain. “Hello, I’m Dr. Abernathy and this is Dr. Odair. How are you doing, Maren?”

 

The girl in the bed sucks in a breath through the oxygen mask. “Better, now that I can breathe.”

 

“Maren is allergic to bee stings and was stung today at practice,” Finnick says. “She was treated for anaphylaxis, but she hit her head on the goal post during the event and says her head hurts at about a seven out of ten.”

 

“Stupid bee, it’s an indoor league,” the young girl says, her voice gravelly.

 

Haymitch does a quick exam. He would usually have the residents, like Finnick, do any consults like this but today he needs to keep his mind occupied. “Schedule her for a head CT,” he says to his mentee. “I want to rule out any bleeds.”

 

Finnick nods and follows orders, even though Haymitch effectively stole the patient right out from under him. _Too bad_ , he decides. _I need this today._

He leaves the ER and takes the elevator to where the locker room is located. He takes his scrubs out and changes, attaches his badge, and pulls out his stethoscope. He even pulls on his white coat even though he doesn’t really need it. His fingers glide over the embroidery above the left breast pocket – _Haymitch Abernathy, MD_. Beneath his name and credentials – _Head – Division of Neurosurgery._

 

This is where he thrives. How many people can say that they can cut open a person’s head and save their life? He may not be the best person in the world – far from it – but at least he’s a good surgeon. At least he has that going for him.

 

In the back of his locker is a photograph, tucked into a cheap magnet frame. He quickly grabs his pager and slams the door shut before he can take in the smiling faces he knows are behind the plastic sleeve.

 

He tucks his pager onto the waistband of his scrubs and marches out of the room, ready to see what craziness is on the surgical schedule today. He doesn’t get too far though before he hears his name.

 

Dr. Plutarch Heavensbee used to be his mentor when he was a resident, the only attending that Haymitch would listen to despite threats of losing his spot in the program. Now the neurosurgeon is Chief of Surgery – the busiest man in the Department of Surgical Medicine, the one who deals with all the paperwork, the one to make sure the unit is a well-oiled machine.

 

“Haymitch, what the hell are you doing here?”

 

“I’m sorry, I have a fifteen-year-old with a possible brain hemorrhage, no time to chit-chat.”

 

“You are scheduled for a day off, you don’t have surgeries today,” Plutarch says.

 

Haymitch shakes his head. “I’m here and I’m rested. Put me on the schedule or I’ll do it myself.”

 

Plutarch glares at him. “Do you enjoy making my life difficult?”

 

“Every minute of every day.”

 

The chief rolls his eyes and falls into step with him so they walk down the hallway side-by-side. When Plutarch took over the chief position when Dr. Seneca Crane retired a few years back, he had been the one to insist to the board that Haymitch take his place as Head of the Division. It had been the moment that Haymitch had been waiting for since he was seven years old – and he had had to think about it. He never imagined himself to be the domestic type, but sometimes Fate is a fickle fiend. In the end, the longer hours and more responsibility be damned. This is who he is and he wasn’t going to change for anyone.

 

“You’re going to regret this, you do know that right?”

 

Haymitch stops midstep and points a finger in Plutarch’s face. “I don’t want any parenting advice from you right now. Clear?”

 

Plutarch raises an eyebrow and Haymitch just shakes his head. “Believe me when I say she’s much happier with me here. It’s not like I’m her father.”

 

Then he takes a few quicker steps, forcing Plutarch to pick up the pace. It effectively changes the tone of the conversation, exactly what Haymitch intended to do. He doesn’t want to think about what he’s missing by being here – but then again, it’s not like the girl actually wanted him around anyway.

 

So he’ll let Effie do her thing and eventually when she stops being furious with him for walking away, she’ll send a picture. It’ll be almost as if it all worked out like the perfect fantasy she had in mind. It’s better this way.

 

“Okay,” Plutarch concedes. “You can have this one patient. If she needs surgery she’s yours, but you take one of the juniors with you. And then I suppose you can stay here on standby in case we end up swamped. You probably have some paperwork to catch up on anyway.”

 

Haymitch grins. “You’re a good man, Plutarch.”

 

“You didn’t give me much of a choice.” The two stop in front of the surgery schedule. It appears that many of the non-emergency surgeries have been delayed by at least an hour. Typical. And there are a few empty slots at the bottom.

 

“Slow today?” Haymitch asks.

 

Plutarch nods. “Empty board day,” he says. “Never know what’s going to happen on an empty board day.”

 

Haymitch thinks back to the last empty board day. It’s always hit or miss what happens in the OR. One day they have surgeons fighting for space and the next it’s a ghost town. Haymitch usually gets an OR when he wants one. His specialty is in trauma neurosurgery, so he typically sees the worst of the worst – the hardest to save and the most likely to die. But that’s the population that keeps his blood running. The adrenaline kick he receives at the notice of an open head wound or intracranial pressure is enough to keep him going through the loss. The ability to try again, hope again, that he can save the next one.

 

Hope. It’s a funny thing. It’s the only emotion that he’s found to be stronger than fear.

 

“Haymitch!”

 

Both Plutarch and Haymitch turn around. Finnick has the scans in his hand and gives them to Haymitch. He puts them up to the light and swears.

 

“This is why the girls never played sports,” Haymitch says to Plutarch. “Look at the damage this girl got from a goal post.”

 

“Archery _is_ a sport, Abernathy,” Plutarch laughs.

 

Haymitch glares at him. “Not one where she can slam her head into a goal post.” He turns to Finnick. “Book an OR and have...who’s the most junior on duty tonight? Have them prep the patient and scrub in.”

 

“Gloss Ritchson?” Finnick says. “You stole this patient from me and you’re having Gloss Ritchson, the intern, scrub in.”

 

“You’ll get the next one, Dr. Odair,” Plutarch says. “In the mean time, page Ritchson and update him on the case.”

 

Finnick grumbles but doesn’t make a scene in front of the chief. Haymitch can tell he’s furious at him for what just went down, but Plutarch is right. He’ll be in on the next surgery and he’ll be able to put a scalpel to a brain rather than just watch. Haymitch needs this surgery entirely tonight to keep his mind focused. Gloss is in the watching and learning stage right now.

 

“He’s thinking of taking on a trauma fellowship,” Haymitch says. “We’ve been talking a little about it. It’s still a while away but...I think he’d be a good fit for our position.”

 

Plutarch nods his head. “Duly noted. Now go prepare for surgery before I change my mind.”

 

Haymitch watches the board change. In OR 8, his name appears along with the name of the patient and the description of the case.

 

_Hawes, M. 15 F. AB Pos. Post Op 13. Procedure: Craniotomy. Staff: Abernathy. Res: Ritchson._

 

“Alright. See you after, Plutarch,” he says before going to get ready.

 

When he walks into the OR, the patient is already situated on the table. The anesthesiologist is doing final checks and balances. The nurses and techs are ensuring everything is in its correct position. Ritchson is already at the sinks, scrubbing his hands so hard they turn red. Haymitch still remembers the first surgery he was allowed to scrub in on. It was Plutarch’s, a fifty-year-old with a closed head wound after falling off his roof after trying a DIY roof repair.

 

“Thank you for letting me scrub in today, Dr. Abernathy,” Ritchson says.

 

Of course he’s a kiss ass – all the ambitious ones are. He just grunts in response.

 

Ritchson finally finishes scrubbing and then backs into the OR. Haymitch watches through the window as he gets assistance into his gloves and then takes his spectator space, ready to watch. Haymitch doesn’t even have to go out into the OR to look and see if the gallery is full. Their hospital only accepts one neurosurgical resident a year and thus their neurosurgical intern, many times, ends up befriending the general surgery interns as a survival mechanism. He knows that every intern in the surgical medicine department who isn’t busy is up in the gallery, watching to see if Ritchson gets to do anything.

 

He shakes his head. The intrigue of the unknown.

 

He looks up at the patient, whose brown hair has been shaved where he’ll do his incision. It’s not as if she looks like Katniss, because she doesn’t, but Haymitch can hear her voice in his head. As much as he tries to block her out, he can’t help it.

 

_“You’re not my father!”_

 

She’s entirely right. He’s biologically her uncle. But where was her father when she struck her first bullseye? Where was he when she broke her tailbone climbing the damn apple tree outside the school? He was dead, that’s where he was, and she was stuck with him because her damn mother was...he closes his eyes. He shouldn’t really be blaming Hunter Everdeen for how messed up his kid is. The blame really falls on Fleur and he knows that, but she’s his twin and admitting how screwed up she became highlights unappealing aspects in himself.

 

He scrubs a little harder and tries to bring his mind back to Maren Hawes, the teenager on his table, rather than the teenager in his home. It works.

 

“Alrighty, Maren,” he says as he walks into the operating room. “We’re going to fix your head, okay? You just stay alive for me and I’ll get you back on the soccer field. Deal?”

 

The girl blinks, already lightly sedated.

 

“Okay, put her out.”

 

...

 

"Abernathy is a monster."

  
  
Johanna snorts and doesn't even look up from the chart. She finishes up her clinical note as Finnick plops into the chair beside her. After his third exasperated huff, she turns to him.

  
  
"What?" she demands. 

  
  
"You're supposed to agree with me."

  
  
She shakes her head and turns back to her chart. "Last night you were singing a different tune."

  
  
"Well, that was before he stole my surgery."

  
  
Johanna turns back to him and glares. "Do you see this? I'm doing scut and I have been doing scut since I was put on Coin's rotation. I am never going to get into an OR and you're complaining because you have to wait for the next dumbass with a crack in his head?" She turns her back to him. "Jerk."

  
  
Finnick pulls his chair up behind her and rests his chin on her shoulder. "Coin is never going to let you into her OR. She hates interns."

  
  
Johanna shakes Finnick off. Most of the other female doctors aren't so immune to his appearances and flirtatious mannerisms. Johanna already got him out of her system. They met at the orientation dinner for the new interns this year - he was a fifth year neurosurgery resident and she was an ickle firstie with her entire career ahead of her. What she hadn't expected when they slept together was that he would become her best friend – despite age differences and specialties. But he is her best friend and she's his. It's the first time in a long time that she remembers having a friend and not just competition.

  
  
"Well, I'm hoping to change her mind," Johanna says. "Her recommendation would get me into any cardio fellowship."

  
  
Finnick rolls his eyes at her and she chooses to ignore him. Even she knows what a hardass Dr. Coin is - fierce, independent, and heartless, which is exactly the doctor Johanna wants to be. To be able to train under her would be a huge stepping stone for her career. It is too bad that Finnick is right - Coin doesn't teach, despite threats from the chief about losing her place not only as head of cardio but as an attending as well.

  
  
She's good enough not to have to listen.

  
  
But that never stopped Johanna.

  
  
"Doing her charts is just going to make her life easier, not earn you any brownie points."

  
  
Johanna scowls at him. "At least Coin is the same hardass with everyone."

  
  
That gets Finnick off her back. He tosses his head back and groans.

  
  
"I know! I had everything all set and then he just swoops down and pulls Gloss in. Gloss! The only reason the guy's even here is because his sister's being primed to take over the gyny squad. She had to have pulled for him."

  
  
Johanna shakes her head. "So, now he's stuck in surgery so you get the next one. And, according to karma, it should be a good one."

  
  
"Stop," Finnick says. "I want to have a pity party. Can I have that please?"

  
  
"Fine, but I'm going back to my charts." 

 

“You’re not going to throw me a parade?”

 

She doesn’t dignify his question with an answer.

 

Finnick huffs and leans back in his chair, crossing his arms and pouting like a small child. Johanna’s not surprised – she’d be pissed too. But Finnick will be fine as soon as his pager starts beeping or he has to go rounding. Once he gets back into taking care of his patients, he’ll completely forget about the case.

 

It’s all or nothing with Finnick. He can put on a big show, but in reality a lot of times it is just a show.

 

Finnick sits there for a few minutes, watching her do her charts, before he seems to decide it’s time to round on the post-ops, leaving her in silence. She smiles, but looks at her piles, and frowns. There are so many patients she still has left to do. Coin better appreciate this.

 

She gets through a few more before she looks up. Outside the window of the research room, everyone seems to fly by. Doctors, nurses, scrub techs. She wants to move at the speed of light, be so important that she has to literally sprint. She turns back to her project. Right now, she is nothing but useless.

 

The door opens and she thinks it must be Finnick again, but it’s not. Instead it’s Dr. Chaff.

 

“Dr. Mason,” he says. “What are you doing in here?”

 

“I’m on Coin’s service.” She nods to the charts. “I’m doing her clinical notes.”

 

Chaff snorts. “Put those away. I need an intern and you’re it. Let’s go.”

 

It takes her a minute to think about it. If she leaves these for Chaff’s service, she’s basically kissing goodbye her chances of ever being in Coin’s good graces again. But she’ll be useful. She was on Chaff’s service last and she didn’t mind learning about the vascular surgeon’s cases. Some of them were really interesting.

 

Screw it. She grabs the charts to put them back in their place before she goes to follow Chaff to the elevator.

 

“You have anything interesting, Dr. Chaff?”

 

He nods as he presses the Level 1 button. Emergency.

 

“Got a MVA coming in on an ambulance,” Chaff says, turning to her. “Apparently the leg is hanging on by a thread. Want me to see if I can reattach it.”

 

Johanna can’t help but grin. “Cool.”

 

The doors open and it is chaos. Everyone in Emergency is fluttering around, most of the beds completely taken and triage full.

 

“It’s like people forget how to drive in the rain when they do it every day,” Chaff says. He tells her to follow him and he figures out where the consult is needed. Room 3, the nurse says, and the two make their way in. People pack the room. Trauma surgeon, nurses, ER docs. And now them.

 

“What do we got?” Chaff shouts as he gets a pair of gloves.

 

One of the ER residents responds. “Peeta Mellark, seventeen. Car hydroplaned through an intersection and got t-boned by a pick up truck on the driver’s side. Other passenger seems to be fine. Looks like he took the brunt of the crash.”

 

Chaff nods and walks over to the foot of the bed. Johanna’s eyes widen when she sees the damage. The report Chaff received didn’t exaggerate. She can see the table through the leg.

 

“The cut’s are clean. I can reattach. Can we move him to OR?”

 

The ER doc at the head of the bed shakes his head. “We’re waiting on neuro.”

 

The door opens and, as if beckoned by their conversation, Finnick flies in, completely in his element. Someone would be hard pressed to imagine that just an hour or so ago Finnick was sitting with her complaining about having his surgery stolen.

 

“What do we got?”

 

The same resident flies through the patient’s information again. Finnick takes the helm at the top of the table while the rest of the doctors work on their respective regions of the body.

 

“ICP is a little high for me,” Finnick says. “I want to get him to CT to get a better picture of what we’re dealing with.” He looks around the table. “Dr. Chaff, how’s he doing down there.”

 

“Quicker we get him to CT, quicker we can get him to the OR and the more likely it is that I can save his leg.”

 

“He’s going to lose his leg?!”

 

Johanna turns around and raises her eyebrows at the girl in the doorway. Her face is all cut up and it looks like she could use a few stitches, but other than that she looks completely fine. Her shirt and skinny jeans didn’t even rip. She must be the other kid in the crash the ER res was talking about, which makes Johanna snort. Talk about being in the right place at the right time – aside from looking like she’s going to hurl, she’s perfectly fine, and this kid is fighting for his life.

 

Chaff looks up from the kid’s leg and frowns. “Katniss?”

 

“Someone get her out of here and into the surgical break room to wait for Dr. Abernathy,” Finnick yells.

 

“No!” the girl shrieks. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m the reason he’s here – I’m not leaving.”

 

“You were in the car?” Johanna rolls her eyes at Finnick’s surprise – it’s kind of obvious given her appearance, but she supposes if he was so focused on the boy he might not have connected the girl.

 

She is confused at how he knows her though.

 

Finnick glares at the girl and points to one of the trauma interns. “Check on her.”

 

Chaff shakes his head. “Haymitch is going to kill you,” he tells the girl, the hint of a chuckle in his voice.

 

Beeps fill the room and attention changes from the girl to the boy.

 

“BP’s dropping,” someone says.

 

“Alright, let’s move him.”

 

Finnick flashes his light in the kid’s eye as he shouts over his shoulder at the intern. “Is she set?”

 

“There’s something up with her eyes–”

 

“Probably shock,” Finnick says, cutting him off. “Put her in a bed and give her some saline. I’ll come back down to check her and discharge her after I get him into CT. She’s my patient tonight, no one send her home to Effie.”

 

Chaff instructs her to go to CT with Finnick and to page him when they’re ready to take the kid to OR. Once the elevator doors shut, she turns to Finnick.

 

“How did everyone know the girl?”

 

He looks at her and then shakes his head. “Oh, Katniss?” he asks. “That’s Dr. Abernathy’s niece – basically his own kid though. He has custody of her. She’s supposed to be at prom tonight.”

 

“Didn’t look dressed up for prom to me,” Johanna says. “I mean, maybe dress codes changed, but when I went to prom, skinny jeans wouldn’t have flown.”

 

“Haymitch is going to be furious when he finds out she’s here,” Finnick says as the elevator dings for their floor. The doors open and the two wheel the gurney toward CT. “She’s going to be grounded until she leaves for college.”

 

Johanna snorts. “Not sure that’s going to happen,” she says. “It looks like he controls her so well.”

 

Finnick shrugs. “You know, even if this kid ends up not being surgical, Abernathy got his karma,” he says.

 

Johanna shakes her head. “You’re awful, you know that right?”

 

Finnick grins and winks at her from across the gurney. Cocky, asshole Finnick, but she wouldn’t have him any other way.

 

...

 

He remembers the first surgery he ever scrubbed in on. It was Dr. Abernathy’s, a woman who fell on her Coumadin and had a subdural hematoma. They released the pressure in the woman’s head by creating burr holes, drilling through her skull and watching the blood pour out.

 

He thought that that surgery might come in handy today – figured the kid, Peeta, might have a similar sort of injury. But the scans show no bleeding or fractures, and his intracranial pressure – while higher than Finnick would like to see – is stable. Not surgical, at least on his head.

 

Johanna wheels him down the hall to the elevators, ready to bring him to the OR to meet Dr. Chaff, where they’ll try to reattach the leg, and Finnick assists her. Once he finishes, he’ll head back up to round on his post-ops and wait for another consult. Meanwhile, Dr. Abernathy is probably finishing up on his craniotomy for the bee sting girl.

 

He’s halfway through his rounds when he remembers Katniss in the ER. He really doesn’t need to go back down there – the ER residents are more than capable of helping her and then discharging her. But Finnick knows that if they discharge her to Effie, Haymitch will just get pissed at him for letting her “get away” with what happened. So, instead, he’ll discharge her, and he’ll discharge her to Haymitch, and maybe then Haymitch will stop being a jackass to him.

 

He doesn’t think he’s any less of a surgeon than the other neurosurgical residents, even the sixth and seventh year. In fact, he thinks he’s a little better than some of them. But for some reason Abernathy loves to pick on him. Dr. Chaff, who has been friends with Dr. Abernathy since they were residents together, told him once that Haymitch being a jackass to you is a compliment. He said that you want to be scared when he’s nice to you because it means he thinks you’re an imbecile. And Finnick isn’t usually someone who relies on a whole ton of praise. But, for once, he’d love for Dr. Abernathy to tell him he did a good job.

 

All of the curtained areas of the ER are in use. It’s like Dr. Chaff always says – people who have lived in the rain their entire lives forget how to drive in it when it’s coming down heavy like this. He opens up all the curtains and does not find Katniss anywhere.

 

He swears under his breath. She has to be here somewhere.

 

He flags down the nurse who paged him to Mellark. He recognizes her vaguely – Annie Cresta, her badge says.

 

“The girl that came in with the severed leg kid – Katniss Everdeen,” he says. “You see where she went?”

 

Annie nods her head. “We had another MVA come in that was pretty bloody and she didn’t like being around all the blood. Since she was already through her saline drip, we let her sit in the waiting room.”

 

Finnick thanks her and shakes his head at the story. Of course. Haymitch told him in passing once that Katniss wasn’t a doctor. The little one, Prim, he said might be able to follow in the family occupation and make a great surgeon. Finnick did a little snooping after that comment and found out that Dr. Abernathy’s sister was the Dr. Fleur Everdeen at Massachusetts General Hospital, the same one who created the Everdeen Method before she passed away about ten years ago. Haymitch doesn’t talk about her, just the girls, and Katniss – as rough and tumble as she may seem on the outside, he said – was much too squeamish for the job.

 

He walks into the waiting room and scans the chairs until he finds her. She’s in one of the farther chairs, her head in her hands and her face still pale. As he approaches, he can see more of her features. Her mouth dips, what Finnick has come to know as the look someone has as they fight nausea, but it’s her eyes that catch him off guard. When she looks up, they stare straight ahead, like the symptom of shock the ER intern had seen. But there is more. Deep purple blotches have formed around her eye sockets.

 

Raccoon eyes.

 

His mouth goes dry as he tries to reassess. They were treating her for shock with saline when in reality that wasn’t helping her at all. Raccoon eyes are not a symptom of shock. They’re a symptom of something worse.

 

He walks over and kneels in front of her. Katniss swallows.

 

“I’m tired and my head hurts,” she mumbles. “Can I go lay down in an on-call room?”

 

Nausea. Fatigue. Headache. Raccoon eyes. All symptoms of a basiliar skull fracture.

 

Shit.

 

“We’ll get you on a gurney as soon as we get out of the waiting room,” he tells her, helping her out of her chair. He would rather pull the gurney in here, not sure what damage she already has, but it’s much too packed. Instead, he carries most of her weight and as soon as he’s through the doors he calls for a gurney.

 

He turns to Annie, who has arrived back at his side. “Page the chief,” he says. “Tell him to meet me in CT.”

 

...

 

“Dr. Chaff, this page is for you.”

 

Johanna stands beside Chaff, watching as he meticulously reconnects every tiny fragment. It’s amazing that the kid will have two legs after this accident. Of course, it may not be fully functional, but time and physical therapy will prove that. But for a seventeen-year-old, with his entire life ahead of him, Johanna thinks this is pretty good.

 

“Answer it for me, Lavinia?”

 

The attendant picks up the pager and walks across the room to the telephone.

 

“So, I’m thinking after I finish this major feat of reattaching this kid’s leg, I’m going to take a nice long vacation and do nothing but golf,” Chaff says to the surgeon across the table from him. “What do you think of that?”

 

Dr. Brutus Gunn, an orthopedic surgeon, laughs. “Like you’d ever take a _nice long vacation_ , Moses. You’re kidding yourself.”

 

Chaff laughs. “Sometimes it’s nice to dream.” He looks up. “Yes, Lavinia.”

 

“The boy’s parents are here and would like an update.”

 

Dr. Chaff nods and looks over his shoulder at Johanna. “Can you pass along an update, Dr. Mason? You can tell them that he’s doing very well, but it will still be a few hours before we know anything definitively.”

 

Johanna nods and walks out of the room, taking off her surgical gown and mask before walking into the hallway. She walks into the OR waiting room and looks around. There are plenty of families there. How the hell is she supposed to know who the kid’s family is?

 

She takes a guess that the blond couple standing near the entrance looking frazzled is the kid’s parents.

 

“Mr. and Mrs. Mellark?” she says. She’s right; the blond couple comes running.

 

“How is he?” the mother demands. “The people in the emergency room say he’s in surgery?”

 

Johanna nods. “He is. The force of the car accident caused a considerable amount of damage to his leg and it was severed–”

                                                                                                                           

“Wait, what?” the dad says.

 

“His leg was _severed_ ,” the mother squeals.

 

Johanna bites her tongue. “Yes, at the knee, but Dr. Chaff is a great vascular surgeon and he’s doing everything in his power to reattach the limb. It was a fairly clean partial amputation, so he should be able to reattach it.”

 

The parents take it in for a moment and then the mother looks up at her. “Will it be fully functional? After he reattaches it?”

 

“Time will tell.”

 

Mrs. Mellark scowls. “So, what you’re telling me is that after this surgery, my son is going to be some freak with a gimpy leg? He is a football and wrestling champion. He’s going to be a D1 quarterback in the fall. It has to be functional.”

 

Mr. Mellark puts a hand on her shoulder, but the mother just keeps shaking her head.

 

“We’re doing everything we can,” Johanna says. “But it’s going to be a long road to recovery, and that’s if he regains total function. Honestly, he lost a lot of blood in the accident. He’s lucky to be alive.”

 

“If his leg isn’t going to be fully functional, chop it off,” the mother says. “I’m not having him turn into some gimp! You tell the head surgeon that when you go back in.”

 

Johanna swallows and looks at the father, hoping that he’ll say something to counteract the mother’s requests. But the father just looks shocked and says nothing.

 

“Get back in there,” the mother says. “The longer you’re out here the less you’re doing to help my son.”

 

Johanna walks back to the OR, scrubs her hands and redresses in her surgical gown and mask. When she walks in, she stands in the doorway until Dr. Chaff looks up.

 

“Yes, Dr. Mason?”

 

“The mother has requested that if you can’t reattach the leg with guaranteed complete function she would rather you chop it off,” she says. “Her words, not mine.”

 

Chaff and Brutus stare at each other over the leg they’re repairing.

 

“What did you tell them, Mason?” Brutus says.

 

“I just told them the truth, he’s doing well but his leg’s severed so time will tell if we can save it totally, and then she went off on a tirade about division one football.”

 

Chaff shakes his head. “Brutus, do you have this for a moment? I think I need to talk to the family.” Brutus nods. “Page me if something goes wrong. Dr. Mason, let’s go back out to talk to Mom and Dad.”

 

...

 

The door flies open and before Finnick can blink Dr. Heavensbee is standing over his shoulder.

 

“Scans up yet?”

 

“Just coming now.”

 

They wait a few moments as the screen shifts and then they’re looking at nine different shots of Katniss’s head. Finnick begins to scan them, but Dr. Heavensbee’s trained eyes pick up on it first.

 

“There,” he says, pointing to the scan on the top left. “You can barely see it, but it’s there.”

 

“Great,” Finnick mutters. “I misdiagnosed Abernathy’s kid.”

 

Heavensbee shakes his head. “It’s not about what you did, it’s about what you do now,” he says. “Honestly, best course of action for this if she’s barely symptomatic is treat it with pain meds and wait for it to heal on it’s own.” He looks at a different screen. “What I’m more concerned about is that.”

 

Finnick turns and nods his head. “Yeah, when I did another exam I heard something odd, so I ran scans of her chest too,” he says. “Hemopericardium.”

 

“Blood in her pericardial sac,” Heavensbee mutters. “Alright, page Dr. Coin. We’ll get her to an OR and everything will be alright.”

 

Beeping fills the room and Finnick leaps out of his seat. She’s coding. Heavensbee darts out of the viewing room and into the CT room first, yelling for Finnick to get a crash cart. When Finnick gets back into the room, he freezes for a moment. Blood streams out of Katniss’s nose and ears.

 

“There’s spinal fluid in the blood,” Heavensbee says as he prepares to shock Katniss’s heart back into rhythm. “Forget what I said about pain meds – we need to get her to an OR. Now.”

 

It seems as though it is only moments before he stands beside Dr. Heavensbee in OR 13. He knows he secured their OR, paged Dr. Coin, and readied himself to be standing here, but none of it registers. Instead, he thinks about how everything goes from bad to worse.

 

Heavensbee will fix her head. The only reason they need to go in surgically is because of the spinal fluid leakage. He’ll fix up the hole and she’ll be fine. And Dr. Coin will relieve the pressure on her heart caused by the build up of fluid and restore blood flow. She’ll be just fine.

 

But he can’t help but retrace his steps. What if he hadn’t been so focused on Peeta? Would he have still blown off Katniss’s symptoms of shock? He’ll never know.

 

“Someone page Chaff,” Heavensbee says. “I want him on standby to deal with Haymitch. He should be finishing up with that craniotomy and the last thing I need is him to see this on the board and come storming in.”

 

“Chaff’s in surgery,” Finnick tells him. “The driver, her friend or something. He’s attempting to reattach his leg.”

 

Heavensbee shakes his head. “Great,” he mumbles. “Alright, uh, page Dr. Seeder. I know she just got out of surgery, so she shouldn’t be back in an OR. But have her come in here and I’ll explain this to her and how I want this handled.”

 

Finnick nods and steps out of the room. Once he finishes the page, he returns to the room.

 

“If you don’t stop looking like a kicked puppy I’m going to have you removed from this OR, Dr. Odair,” Heavensbee says.

 

“No, I need to stay,” he says. As much as he wants to run as far away as he can, he needs to stay. “I’m the reason why she’s in here in the first place. I misdiagnosed her.”

 

Heavensbee shakes his head. “BSFs hardly ever show up on a CT scan. They’re hard to diagnose and if she hadn’t started leaking spinal fluid she wouldn’t even be here and now she’s getting both operations she needs,” he says. “So, quit blaming yourself and watch and learn.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

The doors to the OR open and Dr. Seeder steps inside, holding a mask up to her face. She stares at Katniss for a moment before looking up at Heavensbee, who doesn’t lose focus from his patient.

 

“That is not who I think it is.”

 

“It is exactly who you think it is, which is exactly why you’re here,” Heavensbee says. He looks up only briefly. “Haymitch is going to get out of a craniotomy any minute now and I can’t have him in this OR. So you need to be the one to inform him that she’s here, not the OR board.”

 

Dr. Seeder nods. Finnick knows that Dr. Seeder was part of the original resident group that Haymitch was in. He, Dr. Chaff, and Dr. Seeder were all offered attending positions at the conclusion of their residencies and fellowships. Dr. Abernathy and Dr. Chaff did their fellowships at the hospital before taking their attending positions. Dr. Seeder became an attending general surgeon. They’re the only three still left at the hospital from their group and they’re all still fairly close. If anyone besides Dr. Chaff is going to deliver this news to Haymitch, Finnick knows why the chief chose Dr. Seeder.

 

“Alright, what happened?”

 

Heavensbee turns to Finnick. “You know more than I do.”

 

Finnick blows out a breath against his mask. “She was in a car accident and she seemed completely normal but then started showing symptoms of a basiliar skull fracture. Dr. Heavensbee is fixing the hole in her head that is allowing the spinal fluid to leak out and Dr. Coin is fixing a secondary issue. She has a hemopericardium.”

 

Dr. Seeder shakes her head. “I’ll try my best to keep him calm.”

 

“We’ll give updates,” Heavensbee says.

 

“Anyone contact Effie?”

 

Heavensbee turns to Finnick. Finnick shakes his head. “No.”

 

Dr. Seeder nods. “I’ll get someone to call her and I’ll tell Haymitch.”

 

“Thank you, Glory.”

 

“You owe me, Chief.”

 

After Dr. Seeder leaves, the OR is silent for a moment, with the only noise being the beeping machines. Dr. Heavensbee looks up from her brain and down at Dr. Coin.

 

“How’s she doing, Alma?”

 

Coin doesn’t look up. Finnick watches as she works – methodical, like some sort of robot or machine, with little emotion.

 

“Well, she was in rough shape, but I’m an expert at what I do,” she says. “She’s not going to die today because of a hemopericardium.”

 

“Perfect,” Heavensbee says. “What’s that saying that Haymitch always uses?”

 

Finnick snorts. “Stay alive.”

 

Heavensbee nods, smiling a little as he continues correcting the hole. “Ah yes. See, Katniss, all you have to do is stay alive and we’ll make you good as new. It’ll be like it never even happened.”

 

Finnick crosses his fingers.

 

...

 

“I’m sorry I sent you out here as an intern,” Dr. Chaff says as they walk toward the waiting room. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

 

“I would have been fine if Mom wasn’t a raging lunatic.”

 

Chaff holds out a finger to her, as if to say to stop talking, and then they continue out to the waiting room. The parents must recognize Johanna because they stand up and meet them.

 

“Are you the surgeon?” the mother asks. “I need to know what the chances are that my son will regain total function of his leg.”

 

“Mr. and Mrs. Mellark, I’m Moses Chaff,” he says, ignoring the mother’s demanding question to start with formalities. “I’m the head of vascular surgery and I’m also board certified in pediatric surgery.”

 

“You’re Peeta’s surgeon?” the father asks.

 

“Yes,” Dr. Chaff says. “And he’s doing great, but as Dr. Mason explained earlier, we won’t know anything definitively for another few hours. However, if it is successful, he’s going to have a tough battle ahead of him. It’s going to be a long road to recovery with more surgery most likely, but–”

 

“What are the chances of a full recovery?” Mrs. Mellark interrupts.

 

Dr. Chaff shakes his head. “I don’t do odds, but I will say that he’s seventeen and he has his whole life ahead of him and, as his surgeon, I feel that it is in his best interest to move forward with the entire surgery because there is a very good possibility that he’ll have at least partial function of his leg at the end of this.”

 

Johanna turns from Dr. Chaff to the parents to see their reactions. The father lets out a breath but the mother opens her mouth for rebuttal. Johanna grinds her teeth.

 

“Dr. Chaff, I understand that you are an expert in your field, but I’m an expert in my son,” she says. “He’s an athlete. He’s a competitor. That’s all he’s ever known. His brother is a defensive linebacker at Ohio State and his other brother just signed with the Denver Broncos. Now, there are games for people with one leg, there are no games for people with one good leg and one leg that drags behind him. He’ll be devastated.”

 

Dr. Chaff’s jaw tightens. “Like I said, we won’t know anything definitively for another few hours. I need to get back in there and continue.”

 

Then he turns around. Johanna quickly follows behind him, shocked by his curt exit.

 

“Dr. Chaff?”

 

He shakes his head and stops just as they arrive to the doors of the OR. He turns to Johanna and shrugs.

 

“Sometimes we make difficult calls in peds.”

 

“So we’re...going to stop the surgery?”

 

Chaff shakes his head. “No. We’re going to keep going. Like I said, nothing is definitive so we’re going to reattach that leg.”

 

...

 

Haymitch walks through the doors, ready to scrub off the surgery. He goes into every surgery with the expectation that he can save the patient and part of that is due to his post-surgery rituals. Even after successes, after surgeries that can only be described as routine, he scrubs them off with as much fury as he does the losses. Cockiness does him no good. He can lose someone as quickly as he can save them. He can’t bring his past into his present.

 

So he scrubs.

 

The door opens just as he turns the water off. He turns and smiles.

 

“Dr. Seeder,” he smirks. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

 

When she doesn’t roll her eyes at him, the smirk falls off his lips. He lets his eyes scan her face for any clue at her serious stance. Her jaw tightens and he knows there is something wrong.

 

“Who died?” he asks.

 

She shakes her head. “No one died, but I need you to count to ten after I tell you this because you can’t storm out of here.” She sucks a breath in. “There was an accident.”

 

He closes his eyes momentarily. For just a second he is twenty again and sitting at a bar. He pushes it out of his head. Instead, he opens his eyes and focuses on his longtime friend.

 

“Glory,” he says, his heart rate double what it should be. “Spit it out.”

 

“Katniss was in a car accident. She’s in an OR and she’s doing fine. I just saw her about twenty minutes ago,” she says.

 

He can hear the clink of a shot glass against the wood of the bar.

 

“Diagnosis?”

 

“Basiliar skull fracture that Dr. Heavensbee is working on and hemopericardium that Dr. Coin is fixing.” She steps forward and squeezes his hand. “She has the best of the best working on her.”

 

He swallows. He grinds his teeth.

 

Then he charges passed her.

 

“Haymitch!” she shouts, but he doesn’t listen. He can’t. “You can’t go in there!”

 

He scans the OR board and finds the room she’s in. Seeder holds his arm and tries to keep him from moving forward, keeps yelling at him to count to ten, but it can’t stop him. He can’t stop. He grabs a paper mask and holds it in front of his face, for the first time remembering that his hands are still wet as he feels the paper mask soaking in his fingers. He still doesn’t stop.

 

She’s still alive.

 

“Glory, don’t feel bad, I figured he’d make his way in here,” Dr. Heavensbee says when Haymitch walks in, Seeder right behind him. “Abernathy, get out of my OR.”

 

“I want to scrub in.”

 

“No.” Heavensbee looks up at him and shakes his head to add a point before continuing with his surgery. “This is too personal for you.”

 

Haymitch puffs out his chest. “I’m the head of neuro.”

 

“I’m the chief of surgery. Get out or you’re fired,” Heavensbee says.

 

Haymitch tries to come up with a better excuse to stay but nothing comes to mind. All that’s there are memories that he’s pushed away for so long making a comeback.

 

Plutarch sighs. “It’s against hospital policy, Haymitch. You have to get out of here so I can do my job and Dr. Coin can do her job so we can get Katniss out of here and on the mend.”

 

His eyes land on Katniss. She looks so small on the table, surrounded by machines. She has a large tube coming out of her throat and he tries to ignore how he can see into her chest cavity as he passes the table. Small lacerations cover her face, but other than that she could be sleeping.

 

“Stay alive. That’s your job right now, sweetheart. Stay alive.”

 

He looks up to Heavensbee. Beside him is Finnick, who looks on with wide eyes.

 

“We’ll keep you updated,” Heavensbee says.

 

Seeder grabs his arm. “Come on, Haymitch. Let’s go outside and wait for Effie.”

 

He takes one final look at Katniss, at the machines telling him that she’s still alive, and then follows her out of the room. The door swings shut behind him and he feels trapped, like he’s trying to swim with sandbags tied to his ankles. He doesn’t recognize the walk he takes to the waiting room, a walk he’s taken so many times before as a doctor. But that’s just it – he’s taken this walk as a doctor. He never got the chance to do this before.

 

He collapses into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs and tries to pretend this is just a bad dream.

 

He’s never been that lucky though.

 

...

 

The memory is so vivid in his mind that it’s almost like he’s there.

 

The year is 1986. It’s spring. At twenty, he’s a young junior at West Virginia University, so technically he’s not even supposed to be at the bar despite the fact that he could legally drink last year. This is the year they raised the drinking age. It’s the year he took the MCAT. It’s the year everything fell apart.

 

He sits at the bar and the bartender, Ripper, just stares at him.

 

“I aced the MCAT,” he says.

 

“I’m not giving you a celebratory drink.”

 

“I beat my sister,” he says.

 

“I’m not giving you a celebratory drink.”

 

Haymitch swallows. “I opened the envelope and immediately called my mom. I knew she’d be happy, but she didn’t pick up.” He blinks. “There was an accident. That’s what my grandmother said when I called her. While I was opening my envelope, my mom was picking my brother up from practice and they got in an accident. And they’re gone.”

 

He looks up at Ripper. “Today is supposed to be a great day and now I have to tell my sister that our mother and Shamus are dead.”

 

The older bartender sets a single shot glass in front of him, filled with white liquor.

 

“That’s not a celebratory drink.”

 

He tips the liquor down his throat, allowing it to burn all the way down.

 

Today is supposed to be the first day of the rest of his life. Instead it’s the day he almost fucks it all up.

 

...

 

Effie’s face lacks make-up. It’s the first thing he notices when she steps off the elevator with Prim’s hand clasped in her own. There have only been as many times as he can count on his fingers that he has seen Effie leave the house without make-up. Hell, when they first started...whatever the hell they were doing when they first met...Effie would set a quiet alarm and get up before him to put herself together. It’s just part of who she is – because God forbid she run into anyone she knows (or doesn’t know for that matter) looking like _some sort of barbarian_.

 

He doesn’t stand when they approach him. He’s too afraid his legs will give way.

 

“The chaplain that called the house wouldn’t give me any details,” Effie says, taking the seat directly beside him. “She just said to come here. Do you know anything?”

 

He looks over her shoulder for a moment at Prim, who wears a pair of pajamas that have sheep on them.

 

He shakes his head, chickening out. That’s what he does best when it comes to the people in his life.

 

“Did you see her?” When he doesn’t answer, Effie knows the truth. “How is she?”

 

“Like she got hit by a fucking truck, Eff. What do you expect? A few bruises and a Barbie Band-Aid. That’s not how this works.”

 

He wishes he could take back the words as soon as they leave his mouth, but he’s never been good with words. He’s too impulsive and has no filter. By now, Effie should know this.

 

Effie turns away from him, crossing her legs and arms, body language that shows her displeasure with him. Beside her, Prim stares at the floor tiles. He knows he should apologize.

 

“Plutarch’s got her. She’s in good hands,” he says. It’s as close to an apology as she’ll get.

 

Effie nods her head and doesn’t turn back toward him. Haymitch leans his head against the wall behind his chair.

 

...

 

She has been standing on her feet for hours, just to the left of Dr. Chaff in a location that will keep her out of the way. At one point, she even got to hold a clamp. But now she holds her breath. Chaff and Brutus are ready to see if their work has restored adequate blood flow. They’re getting ready to remove the leg from ice and remove the tourniquet now that the vessels have been grafted.

 

She swears she can hear everyone holding their breaths.

 

It only takes a second. Once they complete the procedure, they step back to see what happens. The skin is still broken and she can see the red tissue, but she can no longer see the table through the kid’s leg. The broken bone of his leg has been set and screwed.

 

It only takes a second for the grey pallor of the kid’s lower calf to turn pink.

 

The entire room begins a latex-muffled clap.

 

“Alright, someone page plastics,” Dr. Chaff says as he turns back to the patient, the surgery not yet finished.

 

...

 

It only takes a second.

 

Beeping fills the room. Finnick looks between Dr. Coin and Dr. Heavensbee, both of whom have turned their attentions to the monitors.

 

“What the?” Heavensbee mutters. He looks down and his voice takes on urgency. “She’s hemorrhaging.”

 

“What is going on?” Finnick hisses. He looks down and his eyes widen. A black wave takes over the pink soft tissue of her brain. “Her brain is changing colors.”

 

“Quiet!” Heavensbee shouts. He works for a moment and then pauses. He sighs.

 

Dr. Heavensbee drops his tools onto the tray and Finnick shakes his head. “What are you doing? Fix it.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

Dr. Coin looks up and shakes her head. “Shame.”

 

Finnick reaches across the table and grabs the tools, trying to force them back into Heavensbee’s hands. “Fix it!” he hisses. “Fix her now!”

 

“I can’t, Dr. Odair.”

 

In reality, Finnick knows this, but he can’t accept it. “No. This...you have to fix her because this is my fault.”

 

Dr. Heavensbee shakes his head and waits until Finnick looks him in the eye to speak. “You are a fifth year resident at my hospital, which is one of the most competitive neurosurgical residency programs in the country, so stop acting like an intern.”

 

Finnick feels like he’s going to throw up.

 

“You know exactly what happened,” Heavensbee continues. “It was a carotid dissection. It was not your fault. There was no way we could have predicted it and there is nothing we could have done.” Heavensbee stares at him for a moment, his face set in a steely glare. “Explain it back to me and show me that you deserve to be in this program.”

 

When he opens his mouth, nothing comes out but a gasp. His chest constricts like someone has just tightened a girdle around his lungs.

 

“You can’t think of this as Katniss right now.” Heavensbee stares at him. “Explain.”

 

Finnick nods and closes his eyes. “She had a massive CVA and the blood supply to her brain was cut off so even though you fixed the hole so her brain tissue wasn’t coming out of her nose and her ears, and Dr. Coin fixed her heart so there was no more blood in the pericardial sac, the subsequent carotid dissection caused a loss of cerebral function.”

 

The words flow out of his mouth in one breath, his eyes still closed. He breathes a shaky breath in.

 

“Which means?”

 

Finnick opens his eyes. “What do you mean?”

 

“How do you explain that to a family with no medical knowledge?”

 

He sucks in a breath. He holds his stomach in his hands, trying to keep everything in his stomach from coming back up.

 

“It means that she had a hemorrhagic stroke. The blood from the burst vessel accumulated in the brain tissue causing pressure and also deprived her of the blood and oxygen her brain needs to function, so the tissue died. It means she’s brain dead.”

 

Once the words leave his mouth, he turns away from Dr. Heavensbee and vomits on the floor.

 

“Good residents you’ve got in neuro, Heavensbee,” Coin taunts.

 

Finnick puts his head between his knees and takes a few breaths in. He feels Dr. Heavensbee’s thick hands on his shoulders, guiding him away.

 

“Close her up, Dr. Coin,” he hears Heavensbee say, his voice harsh. “Get her to ICU so Haymitch and Effie can see her.”

 

Heavensbee leads him to the surgical sinks and instructs him to clean up. He hands Finnick a cup of water to swish his mouth out with and Finnick does everything on autopilot. This isn’t real. It can’t be real.

 

Once they’re finished scrubbing out, Dr. Heavensbee guides him to the entrance of the waiting room. Finnick knows exactly where he’s being led and stops in the doorway.

 

“I can’t.”

 

“You can and you will.” Heavensbee puts a hand on his shoulder and continues in a more sincere voice than he’s used all day. “Nothing will be harder than this, but this is how you learn.”

 

Finnick nods. He takes a step and pauses. “He’s going to know as soon as he sees our faces.”

 

“I know,” the chief says. “You’re not the only one who thinks this is difficult.” He turns to Finnick and this is the first time Finnick has seen the chief look anything less than composed. “But we got to do it.”

 

He stands next to the chief and looks out into the waiting room. Prim sleeps with her head in Effie’s lap as the woman runs her fingers through the girl’s hair. Haymitch has his head in his hands.

 

He stays a step behind Plutarch as they walk out. Plutarch grabs a chair and sets it down in front of the small family and Finnick stands behind him, dizzy and nauseous on his feet but he can’t sit either. He feels frozen as Haymitch and Effie both look up and, just as he knew would happen, he sees the realization dawn on Haymitch’s face.

 

“No,” he says. “No.”

 

Effie looks startled at Haymitch’s reaction. “What?” Then she turns to Plutarch. “Is the surgery over? Can we see her?”

 

Plutarch brings his fingers together in front of him, taking a moment. “Let’s go back to my office.”

 

Haymitch shakes his head. “Here is fine.”

 

Finnick watches Plutarch take an uneasy breath before reciting the line each doctor ingrains in their interns on their very first day.

 

“We did...everything we could.”

 

Haymitch stands up and the chair falls to the floor behind him. The crash startles Prim awake and Effie gasps. Finnick watches as Haymitch storms out of the waiting room.

 

Effie turns back to them. “Plutarch, what was that?”

 

The chief reaches forward and takes her hand in both of his. “Effie, I’m very sorry, but the news I have isn’t good.”

 

Finnick knows that he is supposed to be paying attention. He needs to take a breath and focus on what the chief is saying. But he doesn’t hear. He watches as the chief tells Effie what happened, what the options are now. He watches as she brings a hand to her mouth, as she wraps her arm around Prim who stares at the chief in a mixture of confusion and drowsiness. But he doesn’t hear anything – not the speech, not the gasps and the tears. Nothing. Nothing but his own beating heart.

 

....

 

Plutarch finds him hours later.

 

It wasn’t like he chose a hard hiding place. He’s sitting on the floor outside the closed cafeteria. It’s the only place in the hospital that he was sure would be empty.

 

“How did you get those?” Plutarch asks.

 

Haymitch looks down at the papers in his lap – her chart. The top of each page has her name and her medical record number. He’s gone through it a million times it seems. He knows exactly what happened, down to the second. He knows that shit happens, shit like carotid dissections. And he knows that if she hadn’t been on the OR table, if she hadn’t started bleeding in the CT scan, she’d have just gone down in the waiting room or the break room or the café without any warning.

 

It doesn’t make him feel any better to know this was her fate.

 

“It’s amazing what the nurses will do when, you know, you’re going to have to pull the plug on your kid in a few hours.” He looks up from the papers to Plutarch. “Are you here for me? Has it really been long enough to declare it?”

 

“Haymitch,” Plutarch says.

 

“Don’t,” Haymitch sneers. He shakes his head. “Just don’t.”

 

“Don’t what?”

 

"Don't say it."

  
  
Plutarch sits down beside him and leans against the wall just like him. They're on the same level, but not really. 

  
  
Haymitch turns to him. "Give me the dignity of my profession," he continues. "Because I know what you're going to say.”

 

Plutarch shakes his head and Haymitch continues. “You want me to say it? You want me to show you that I know it? Okay. I will. You waited the hours. You can declare her brain dead now. Now I have choices to make.”

 

He shakes his head. Plutarch sighs, but doesn’t stop him.

  
  
"I have two options. The first is to hope for a miracle that is never going to happen. Keep her hooked up to machines for however long she has before some sort of infection takes her, because it will. Without the ability to regulate her body temperature or her hormones, she'll die eventually and any hope we have of her waking up will be dashed.”

 

Haymitch gives a dark chuckle.

  
  
"But I'm a neurosurgeon and I know the odds and the science involved. I know she's dead, Plutarch," he says. His voice sounds so calm he's surprised it's coming out of his mouth. "I know that the only logical choice for me is to turn off the machines and to let her go, allow you to harvest her organs to save someone else, and to sign off on that soon because the longer we hold out on this decision, the less viable they become and the less likely it is that she'll have any sort of legacy. I know that. I know that I should do what any self-respecting neurosurgeon would do and end this for her.”

  
  
He tries to swallow the lump in his throat.

 

"I've been the closest thing that kid has had to a father for over a decade, which sucked for her. But she’s only seventeen. She's just a baby. She’s supposed to grow up and hate me for being an awful role model and do something great with her life to spite me. How am I supposed to not hold out some hope that this kid deserved more than the shitty life she got?”

  
  
“No one is asking you not to hope,” Plutarch says.

 

He shakes his head and stands up, tossing the chart on the ground. It lands with a thud next to Plutarch.

 

“I am allowed to be upset,” he says. “So, please, just let me be upset about this because you don’t get it and you can’t help me.”

 

He turns his back on his boss and turns on his autopilot. When he arrives to the room where his small makeshift family sits, he lets out a breath. Prim is gone, probably taken by a social worker to another area of the hospital for a chat. He takes the chair next to Effie, but doesn’t look at her.

 

“We need to talk,” Effie says.

 

“Not much to talk about,” he responds.

 

Effie grunts. “There is a chance–”

 

“Which doctor fed you that bullshit,” he hisses.

 

“Haymitch!”

 

He shakes his head. “Effie, we could wait a hundred years and nothing’s going to change. So, we need to sign legal papers and figure out what we’re doing–”

 

“Will you at least look at me?”

 

He turns.

 

“I’m scared,” she says. “This is what you do every day, but I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m trying to sort it all out but I’m scared. I’m scared of making a mistake. And you come in with all the answers, but I don’t even really get the questions.”

 

He takes a deep breath.

 

“Her brain is dead. It’s not like we put her on a machine and put her on a list and see if we get a match. You don’t recover from this,” he says. “It’s different because it looks like she’s still here. It’s not like someone’s heart stops and they flat line and you work for a while and then you stop and they’re gone and everyone knows they’re gone. There’s a difference because she looks like she’s still here, but that’s the machine. It’s not her. She has no brain activity. None. This isn’t one of those stories you see online. She’s not going to wake up.”

 

Effie closes her eyes and nods. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

 

“So, now we have a choice to make.”

 

“I want to ask Prim about donation,” Effie says. “She needs to be involved.”

 

“She’s thirteen.”

 

She glares at him.

 

“Okay.”

 

They sit in silence, surrounded by the continuous beats of the monitors, while they wait for Prim to return. Nurses flutter in and out, checking vitals, pressing buttons. Every time one walks in, they look to Haymitch and he hates the pity. It makes him want a drink. It’s the first time in years that he’s felt that.

 

Eventually, the door opens. Prim slides in behind one of the social workers Haymitch vaguely recognizes from the surgical floor. She sits down in the chair across the bed from Haymitch and Effie and sets her hands in her lap.

 

“So what happens now?” she asks.

 

Haymitch turns to Effie. He knows he should take the lead on this – he’s the neurosurgeon after all. But he can’t. He married Effie because he needed the girl guidance. It sounds worse than it seemed at the time.

 

“The social worker said that you are making decisions about her organs. What did you decide?”

 

He raises his eyebrows at Effie. She shakes her head at him and then stands up to walk to Prim.

 

“What do you think?”

 

He rolls his eyes. They’re both clueless.

 

“The social worker said that if you decide to donate her organs, then she can save a lot of kids because her organs are small.” Prim nods her head. “That’s what she’d want to do.”

 

Haymitch nods. “So why don’t you say goodbye and then I’ll wait around here until they’re ready to take her to the OR and I’ll meet you at home.”

 

Effie nods.

  
  
"Wait."

  
  
"What is it, Prim?" Effie says, running a hand through the girl's golden hair.

  
  
Prim looks at him with big, tear filled eyes. "We can't go with her?"

  
  
Haymitch blinks and then shakes his head. "Prim, believe me, you don't want to go in there," he says. He kneels down so he can look at her in the eye. "They're going to open her up and take out her organs. It's not going to be something you want to see."

  
  
"But that's when she's going to die," Prim says. 

  
  
Haymitch fights the urge to tell her that Katniss is really already gone – the part of her that is her is already dead. So instead he nods and says, "Yes, that's when her heart will stop beating."

  
  
"She can't die alone."

  
  
"Prim, there will be a room full of surgeons," Haymitch says.

  
  
The tears begin to leak out of Prim's eyes. "But who's going to hold her hand?"

  
  
Behind Prim, Effie bursts into tears. He had been surprised at how composed his wife had been through the whole experience. But it's this, the innocence of Prim's question, that gets to her. That makes this whole thing seem real.

  
  
“I will,” he says. “I’ll go in with her.”

 

Prim throws her arms around him and he stiffens briefly. He can’t believe this is happening. As Prim moves from him to Katniss, he stands up beside Effie.

 

“Are you allowed to do that?”

 

Haymitch shrugs. “I am today.”

 

....

 

Johanna takes a deep breath and looks out through the doorway. It’s early morning now and the waiting room is empty. The only two chairs still in use are those occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Mellark. Although more worry and frustration appears on their faces than her last meeting with them, she’s still fighting the urge to dropkick the mother who requested for Dr. Chaff to chop off a leg that could be salvaged.

 

“Dr. Mason,” Chaff says, patting her shoulder. “Would you like to give them the good news?”

 

“Not sure if it’s good enough,” she mutters, but she walks out anyway.

 

They stand up immediately. It’s hard to deny that she’s out there for them.

 

“Dr. Mason, Dr. Chaff,” the father says in greeting. “How is he?”

 

Chaff nudges her and she’s about to open her mouth when the mother opens hers.

 

“What sort of hospital are you running here, anyway?”

 

She thinks she hears the father groan. Johanna shakes her head. “What?”

 

The woman crosses her arms over her chest and her lips form a thin line across her face. “I have been sitting in this waiting room for hours, waiting. Wondering. And a few mousy kids who look like they’re barely out of college came to give me updates. Meanwhile,” she throws her arms out to gesture to the chairs. “It seemed like every other family here tonight got news that their person, their Peeta, didn’t make it. Hell, there was even a doctor out here who you all killed his whoever, so I’m just wondering what sort of institution this is? Is it a place of healing or a killing factory?”

 

Johanna blinks. “What?”

 

“I can assure you,” Dr. Chaff intervenes. “This is a very good hospital, on top of being a Level 1 Trauma center. Peeta couldn’t have been brought to a better place.”

 

“Please,” the father says. “How is he?”

 

Johanna nods at him, finally getting to the part of the conversation she had rehearsed in her head. “He did very well. It’ll be a bit before we can say anything definitively–”

 

“Of course it will,” the mother scoffs.

 

She turns to Mrs. Mellark.

 

“He’s going to be okay and that should make you happy,” she says, trying to keep her voice calm but knowing she’s failing. But she doesn’t care. She needs to say something. “You’ll get to say hello to him as soon as he gets set up in his room. All those other people you say you saw in the waiting room, they don’t get to say hello – they’re going to say goodbye. Meanwhile, your son’s surgery went as well as we could have expected. His leg is reattached. The road to recovery is going to be long and we’ll be able to know more as the anesthesia wears off, but he’s going to turn eighteen, nineteen, twenty-two, forty-five, and he’s going to have two legs. He might have a limp, it might take months for him to walk with a normal gait, but he’s going to be okay. Sure he’s not going to be playing division one football anytime soon, but he’s alive and as his mother that should be your first question.”

 

She turns to the father. “Someone will be by to bring you to his room when they transport him.”

 

As they walk out, Chaff’s pager beeps. He pulls it off his scrubs, looks at it, and turns to her.

 

“911 from the Chief,” he says. “I gotta go.”

 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go all policewoman on the mom.”

 

Chaff shakes his head. “While I don’t usually condone that approach, sometimes parents need a swift kick in the ass,” he says. He pats her shoulder. “Good job, Dr. Mason. I’m impressed.”

 

She smirks as Chaff takes off down the hallway.

 

Johanna takes a spin toward the locker room, hoping that one of the other interns is at his locker getting a snack bar so she can brag about the surgery she just witnessed. Unfortunately, the room is dead. She walks to her locker and spins the lock, grabbing a bar from the box she keeps there. She’s been on her feet for hours and she missed dinner. This will have to suffice until her shift ends.

 

She slams the door shut and nearly screams when she hears a noise. She peeks her head around the row of lockers and frowns.

 

“Finnick?” she asks. “What are you doing in the intern locker room?”

 

He doesn’t look up. His shoulders shake as his arms wrap around his knees. His scrub cap lies beside him on the floor. As she approaches a small step at a time, his ragged but quick breaths flood her ears.

 

“Finnick?”

 

This time he does look up and when he does she sucks in a breath. His eyes are wide, bloodshot, pupils dilated. His mouth is parted as he breathes through his lips, his nose preoccupied with a small dribble of snot. His face appears to have been splashed with water.

 

His lip quivers. “Jo,” he says, his breathing still too quick. “Jo.”

 

“Finn? What happened?”

 

He shakes his head, his eyes focusing on the ground at her feet. “Jo, I killed my boss’s kid.”

 

....

 

The scrub nurse in the OR guides Haymitch to a chair they have set up beside Katniss's head. They have draped a divider between her head and the rest of her body so he won't be able to see them actively taking the organs out. He is happy for that – the last time he looked into her chest cavity she was still alive and he'd like to keep that image in his head.

  
  
Around him, the room shuffles. He has never been part of an organ harvest. As a neurosurgeon he has been the one to ensure brain death of the donor, but he has always passed that patient off to the transplant team. To Haymitch, organ procurement procedures always clogged up his ORs.

  
  
Chaff backs into the room. The respective transplant surgeons have all arrived, their coolers waiting at the ready. He watches as the circulation nurse walks up to each one of them with her clipboard, double checking that each of them matches the list of recipients UNOS sent them earlier and that each of the doctors are in the correct position. 

  
  
Chaff's scrub nurse told him the basics of what will happen. First, they will make the incision and place cannulas for cold perfusion that will preserve the organs while they work. The heart is normally the first organ to be removed, but due to the hemopericardium her heart has been dubbed ineligible for donation. So, instead, the procedure will begin with Chaff's instruction to turn off the heart-lung machine. Her heart will stop beating and they will begin. One by one the surgical teams from the recipient hospitals will inspect the organs for any abnormalities before removing them. The lungs will go first, then the liver and pancreas, and they will continue until both kidneys have been removed and set on ice for transport.

  
  
Then it will be over.

  
  
He listens into the circulation nurse's role call.

  
  
"Lungs?"

  
  
"Recipient is Cato Ludwig, 17, Grey-Sloan Memorial, cystic fibrosis." 

  
  
"Liver?"

  
  
"Thresh Okeniyi, 18, at Mattel Children's Hospital. Acute liver failure."

  
  
"Left kidney?"

  
  
"Rue Stenberg, 12, Boston Children's Hospital. Hyperplastic kidneys."

  
  
Chaff stands in front of him, already gloved and waiting to begin.

  
  
"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asks.

  
  
Haymitch shakes his head but at the same time says, "Yes."

  
  
He does not want to be here at all. The world around him spins; he can feel beads of sweat on his forehead. But he promised Prim that he would hold Katniss's hand during all of this. 

  
  
Chaff nods his head and takes his position.

  
  
Haymitch leans down next to Katniss's ear. "You did good, sweetheart. We'll take care of your sister, I'm sorry we messed up with you. But you go tell your mother that she doesn't have to worry about her."  He takes a deep breath and swallows hard. "You just...you did good."

  
  
When he looks up, he sees that a few of the nurses are watching with tears in their eyes. Chaff is staring at him. The circulation nurse is just finishing.

  
  
"Today's procedure is organ procurement for donation. Patient's name is Katniss Everdeen, seventeen. Lead surgeon is Dr. Moses Chaff, our head of vascular surgery and attending pediatric surgeon. Dr. Chaff, all recipient transplant teams are here and accounted for. On your ready."

  
  
Chaff turns to him. "Haymitch, it's on you."

  
  
He takes a deep breath, squeezes her hand once more while it's warm, and then nods.

  
  
"Go ahead."

  
  
Chaff nods. "Making the initial incision. Lung team, stand at the ready." 

  
  
Haymitch closes his eyes as he hears Chaff make the midline incision and then the saw cracking through the sternum. He grinds his teeth.

  
  
"Your inspection?"

  
  
"Beautiful," the doctor says, almost greedily.

 

Haymitch looks up to see the surgeon – a young guy with short dark hair, who turns to his resident, a kid who could be a Mellark brother in about a decade. Curly blond hair, almost eager to please. That makes this whole thing that much worse.

 

“Cross, call and tell them to prep Cato,” the surgeon says and the Mellark doppelgänger disappears to call across town.

 

Chaff takes an audible breath. "Alright. Start profusion and turn off the machine."

  
  
The heart monitor makes one additional beep – the loud, long, continuous beep – before one of the nurses turns it off. Haymitch grinds his teeth and screws his eyes shut. 

  
  
Chaff looks at him around the curtain. "You can leave now. You did what you told Prim you'd do."

  
  
He wants to. He wants to run for the hills – or maybe to the bar, drown his sorrows in a way he hasn't in years. But he doesn't stand up. As much as he wants to leave, he stays put.

  
  
And he waits until it's over.

 

...

 

_His first day at Panem Memorial Hospital was a hot day in July. He remembers dressing in his best clothes despite knowing he was going to need to change into scrubs as soon as he arrived. He had been assigned to work with Dr. Abernathy and had been hoping to meet the surgeon at the new intern social the previous night. Instead he had met nearly every other neurosurgery attending and all the residents. Dr. Abernathy never showed up._

_During the dinner he had heard stories about the surgeon. Dr. Abernathy was known around the country for his skills, ranked one of the best neurosurgeons in the US. Finnick had been thrilled to learn that the man would mentor him – until he heard the stories. Dr. Abernathy had made the seventh year resident cry when she was an intern. The crass and hardened man was one of the most intimidating people in the department, the sixth year had told him._

_So, to say he was nervous when he walked in through the doors of Panem Memorial Hospital on that July day was an understatement._

_Dr. Seneca Crane, the chief of surgery, stood at the podium in the small auditorium. Around him were all the new surgical interns. The woman beside him, Enobaria, looked ready to pounce as her leg jiggled up and down. The nervous energy was palpable. He could nearly feel it strangling him as the chief spoke._

_“A month ago, you were in medical school being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors,” he stated. “The years you spend here as a resident will be both the best and worst years of your life. They will push you to your breaking points and only the strongest will survive the test. So, say hello to your competition. By statistics alone, eight of you will switch to an easier specialty, two of you will be asked to leave. This is your arena, your starting line, your game. How well you play is up to you.”_

_He smirked then. “When you hear your name called, you’ll group up to meet your resident. First group: Homes, Jackson, Leeg, Mitchell!”_

_Finnick waited through all the groups, watching as one-by-one the interns stood at the sounds of their names and wandered out to meet their resident. It wasn’t the first time that he felt the difference in his program. As a budding neurosurgeon, Finnick didn’t need his general surgery residency. His seven years as a neurosurgical resident would get him to an attending position, but as the only neurosurgical intern of the year he would have a slightly different path than the rest of the surgical residents. For one, because there were only seven neurosurgical residents including himself, he’d be able to spend more one-on-one time with not only the other residents but the attendings as well._

_Like today, while the rest of the interns were being assigned to older residents who were placed under an attending’s service, Finnick would be learning directly from Dr. Abernathy himself._

_“Odair.”_

_He looked up. The room had emptied out completely, just leaving him and the chief and one other doctor – Dr. Plutarch Heavensbee, the head of the neurosurgery division._

_“For right now, you’ll stay with Dr. Heavensbee,” Dr. Crane said. “Good luck.”_

_Finnick frowned as Dr. Crane made to leave. He turned to Dr. Heavensbee. “Where’s Dr. Abernathy?”_

_“He’s running a tad late,” Dr. Heavensbee said. “But, that’s alright. I usually take our interns for a spin first anyway. I like to introduce you to the hospital myself. He should be here within the hour.”_

_The first hour of his twenty-four hour shift was spent following Dr. Heavensbee on a bonafide tour. And, just as Dr. Heavensbee was leading him to the briefing with the residents before morning rounds, the surgeon’s pager beeped and he turned to smile at Finnick._

_“Dr. Abernathy is just getting in now. Why don’t you go meet him at the nurses’ station?”_

_As he walked toward the center of the floor, he thought about interesting things he might see. Dr. Abernathy specialized in trauma neurosurgery – maybe they’d go consult in the ER. He stood at the nurses’ station, eyeing the door and waiting for Dr. Abernathy. A few nurses, one of the other doctors, and a couple patients’ families all walked in but no one he thought was his mentor. He continued thinking of possible scenarios he might encounter today. A cracked skull. A rare brain malady. A man walked through the double doors holding a young girl. The kid’s head laid on his shoulder as her face took on a pout. Behind him, another girl trailed behind._

_Maybe he’d even get to help out in the OR._

_“Good morning, Dr. Abernathy,” one of the nurses at the table said._

_“Morning,” came the grunt back._

_Finnick pulled his eyes away from the door and glanced back. That was him, the dude with the kids._

_“Dr. Abernathy!” He turned and started rushing after him. “Dr. Abernathy!”_

_“What?” The man turned around, allowing Finnick to catch up._

_He tried to smile but it probably looked more like a grimace._

_“I’m Finnick Odair,” he said. “The new neurosurgical intern.”_

_Dr. Abernathy blinked once. He looked older than Finnick had thought he would – or maybe not older but more disheveled. He had five o’clock shadow and hair that could have used a trim._

_And, as Finnick was judging the man’s appearance, somehow the little blonde girl in Dr. Abernathy’s arms got transferred to his._

_“Great. I’ve got a surgery in an hour that I need to prepare for,” Dr. Abernathy said. “My wife is out of town and the kid is running a freakin’ fever. The day care here won’t take her with it.”_

_Finnick glances down at the kid. She’s small – can’t be more than seven or eight. “What?”_

_Dr. Abernathy turns to the dark haired girl beside him. “Sweetheart, go with Hot Stuff over there and keep an eye on him,” he said. “Make sure he knows what he’s doing.”_

_She nodded. “Got it.”_

_Then Dr. Abernathy turned and started walking away._

_“Wait, I’m your intern, not the babysitter!” Finnick said._

_“She’s your first patient,” Dr. Abernathy said over his shoulder. “And she’s mine so don’t kill her.”_

 

...

 

The chief stands up from his desk. Surrounding him are some of the brightest minds in Seattle and they are all clueless as to what he is about to say. The only other person in the room with the same green undertone is Gloss Ritchson, his intern who was on the floor last night when everything went down.

 

He requested that all his neurosurgeons report to the hospital this afternoon, whether they were on today or not, for an impromptu meeting to discuss logistics. A few keep looking at their watches. One even brought a stack of research papers and is sitting on the couch reading them. He’s missing two – one who won’t be here and one he can’t wait for any longer.

 

As he opens his mouth, the door clicks and Finnick slides in. The dark circles under his eyes give away his last few hours of tossing and turning. Plutarch had told him to go home, sleep it off, but he knew his fifth year resident wasn’t going to be able to sleep. He knew it was merely a formality.

 

“Alright, that’s everyone,” Plutarch says.

 

“We’re missing Haymitch,” Dr. Maysilee Donner says.

 

Finnick’s head drops into his hands. Next to him, Gloss goes green. The two on-call last night and the only two with an inkling of what’s coming next.

 

“That’s what we’re here to talk about,” the chief says. He sits down on the edge of his desk and brings his white coat closed around his chest. “I’ve put Haymitch on a leave of absence. There was an accident last night and Katniss was...involved.”

 

He pauses to take a breath. His surgeons take the time to exchange knowing glances.

 

“Is she okay?”

 

He shakes his head. “No. She died earlier this morning.” He takes another breath. “I’ve informed Haymitch to take some time off and that’s where you all come in. I’m going to need you to take his patients and his shifts. I’ve already readjusted some schedules, but if you have worked with a patient or feel particularly called to take a few of his outpatient cases because you’ve seen them before, please let me know. I want this to be as streamlined as possible. Attendings, use your residents. I’ll take over his duties as head of division until he comes back.”

 

“Do you know when that’ll be?”

 

Plutarch shakes his head. “No. I told him that we’d talk again after the funeral.”

 

“Does he know that?” Dr. Donner asks.

 

He frowns at the odd question. “Of course, that’s what I told him. Why?”

 

She points behind him. “Because he’s on the bridge talking to a patient’s family right now.”

 

Plutarch spins around and looks out his wall of windows. Just as Maysilee said, there is Haymitch.

 

“Damnit,” he mutters.

 

He charges out of his office toward the bridge that connects the wings above the atrium. The patient’s family is walking in the other direction, probably having only asked for directions.

 

“What are you doing here?” Plutarch demands as he gets close to Haymitch. “I told you we’d discuss it after the–”

 

“I can’t be there, Plutarch,” Haymitch cuts him off. “I can’t sleep and I can’t be around Effie and Prim. I need to keep my mind off of it. Please, just let me stay.”

 

“You are not operating.”

 

“Plutarch,” Haymitch groans.

 

“I said no.” The chief shakes his head. “I can’t make you leave, but you are off-duty.”

 

“I just need to focus on something. Just give me one surgical patient.”

 

“You haven’t slept and your kid just died,” Plutarch says. “Do you know how big of a liability that is? The board would have my ass if they knew I even considered it.”

 

“If it gets busy you can put me on-duty.” Haymitch rubs his hands together. “Either that, or I know I’m going to end up at the bar.”

 

“You’ve been thinking of drinking?”

 

Haymitch laughs. “Chief, I was an alcoholic. I always think about drinking.” He shakes his head. “I just usually don’t have a trigger that will actually get me there.”

 

“You can stay but you do not practice medicine,” Plutarch says. “Not unless the apocalypse occurs.”

 

Haymitch grunts.

 

“No witty comeback?”

 

The younger surgeon shakes his head. “My wit is out-of-order today. Try again tomorrow.”

 

...

 

The kid still hasn’t woken up and Johanna finds herself holding her breath as she stands in the doorway. His mother left to open their store – some sort of bakery downtown. The father finally went down for breakfast only after being promised that the kid wouldn’t be alone. She offered to stay because she knows what it’s like to wake up alone.

 

She leans back into her chair and looks at the ceiling. She has already counted the tiles twice.

 

The kid gasps when he wakes up and that’s what draws Johanna away from her third round of tile counting. He looks around the room, jerking. Confused. Johanna reaches for his hands as he starts pulling at tubes and wires.

 

“Hey,” she grunts. “Stop.”

 

The kid stills. He swallows and stares at her. Johanna grabs the cup on the table and jerks it into his face.

 

“Here, small sips.”

 

The kid takes the straw in his mouth and takes a few sips of water. Johanna watches as he looks around, finally becoming aware of his surroundings.

 

“Where...?”

 

“Panem Memorial Hospital,” she says. “You’re going to be okay.”

 

She knows she’s not supposed to say that. The kid could throw a clot in five minutes and be dead for all she knows. What she’s supposed to say is that the surgery went well. But he looks so lost as the confusion and reality morph on his face that she wants to help him.

 

“Kat...?”

 

That’s all the kid is able to get out. She blinks a few times, wondering what he means before it dawns on her. The girl. The girl who was in the car with him, the car that he was driving. The girl who seemed fine and ended up dead while this kid won the odds lottery.

 

There’s no way she can be the one to tell him that.

 

Johanna jumps out of her seat. “Let me go grab the surgeon. He’ll want to see you.”

 

So much for helping the kid.

 

...

 

It’s a little early for the bar, but Finnick didn’t really know where else to go.

 

He doesn’t want to go back to his apartment because he doesn’t want to be alone, but at the same time he can’t stay at the hospital. So, he figures, the bar across the street is a fine alternative. He can sit in a booth and be around people but not have to communicate.

 

He tried, but he sailed through most of the day on autopilot before Dr. Heavensbee finally sent him home.

 

He lifts his beer to his lips and takes a long gulp. Perhaps it will numb the pain.

 

The door to the bar swings open and he turns to see who else has decided to show up before happy hour even begins. He recognizes her – the nurse from the ER whose name he can’t remember. While she walks up to the bar, he looks her up and down once or twice. She’s pretty, with brown curls and tight jeans tucked into rain boots because it’s still raining outside. Without the scrubs she looks less like an ER nurse and more like just a girl and when she turns, seeing him, he wishes he remembered her name.

 

Especially when she remembers his.

 

“Finnick, right?” she asks. “Or Dr. Odair – that was rude.”

 

He shakes her off. “Finnick is fine.” He doesn’t feel like a doctor right now anyway. “I’m sorry but I can’t remember your name.”

 

She smiles, as if it doesn’t matter. “Annie,” she says.

 

He tests it once on his tongue and then jiggles his beer on the table. “So, what brings you here now?”

 

Annie nods to the bartender and then holds up her wallet. “I forgot my card last time I was here. They held onto it for me so I could just pick it up after my next shift.” She nods to him. “What about you?”

 

He smirks, but he’s sure it falls flat. It doesn’t feel like a success. “Happy hour is overrated,” he says. “All the cool kids come before.”

 

Like his smirk, his sarcasm also falls flat.

 

She pats his hand and nods. “You don’t have to say more,” she says, with a sad smile on her lips. “I’ve been here before happy hour on occasion too. Just make sure you call a cab.” Then she stands up from the booth. “See you around, Finnick.”

 

He nods and looks down at his beer. As a college student, he focused on his studies. In med school, he gave himself designated nights. He always figured that if he kept in control he’d never lose himself. He had worked too damn hard to get to where he was and achieve what he had. There was no way he was going to destroy everything in one fell swoop.

 

His graduating class in high school, of which he was the valedictorian, consisted of sixty-five kids. Of those sixty-five, he can count on one hand how many left the shithole they grew up in. Teenage pregnancy, drunk assholes masquerading as football stars, marriages tied together with a single thread all ran rampant and he had always vowed that he would never end up like that.

 

He always thought he was better than them. But, he supposes, he’s actually worse. The only thing they’ve killed are deer or fish in their hunts. He’s killed a person – and not only that but a kid with her whole life ahead of her. Now she’s down in the morgue and he’s wondering why he didn’t order something stronger.

 

...

 

He sits in his car for what must be hours before he even turns it on. He’s pissed at Plutarch for not letting him do anything. He had Ritchson trailing him all morning – the little glossy eyed boy-wonder making sure that he didn’t try to do the only thing he’s actually decent at doing. At one point, he managed to outsmart his babysitter, sending him into an OR with another neurosurgeon before booking it down to the ER where he was sure Plutarch hadn’t gotten to in order to warn them that he was off limits. They even called him into a quick consult when they were slammed.

 

And he froze. He stood at the head of the table, shone the light in the patients’ eyes, and froze – Katniss’s whiny little voice in his ear.

 

Dr. Donner ended up coming down and yelling at him. Once the guy got transferred up to CT, she told him to go home and try to take his mind off of it. They had everything covered here. Take care of himself.

 

He looks out his window up at the massive building that used to be his sanctuary and is now something resembling his prison. Katniss is still in there, in the basement, in a freakin’ cooler drawer and it all just seems like some bad dream. He would do anything to wake up.

 

The sun has long since set before he finally turns his key in the ignition.

 

The house is unnervingly quiet when he gets there. It isn’t like Katniss was loud – there were days when he would come home from the hospital and not even realize she was there until she appeared in front of him. Loud comes from Effie, from Prim.

 

He yells out but neither respond. A note on the kitchen table says Effie ran out and Prim is down the street at Rory’s. Maybe this is all some sort of bad dream. In what world does Katniss die and Effie and Prim go about life as usual? Him, sure. But those two? He figured he’d find them on the couch watching old home videos, going through picture albums, puffy-eyed and nostalgic.

 

They don’t have alcohol in the house. That fuels the already raging fire in his chest. He wants a drink. He’s been sober for longer than Katniss was alive but he needs a drink.

 

Damn Effie for not even allowing herself alcohol in the house. She’s too good for him sometimes.

 

Instead, he takes a seat at the kitchen table and flips on the television. The news is over, he flips past some entertainment shit, he settles for the Mariners. They’re down three runs in the fourth.

 

He pretends the water in his glass is something stronger. Something that will dull the pain. Something that will make him not think about Katniss, not hear her voice, not see her name next to a flat line on a monitor as one of his oldest friends cuts into her.

 

The doorknob jingles and he looks away from a three pitch out just in time to see Effie flutter in amongst four or five different bags.

 

“You went shopping?” The words are colored by disbelief. “Katniss died and you went shopping?”

 

She walks right by him and sets the bags down on their dining room table in the next room over. He doesn’t stand up because he doesn’t want to fuel her. His rationality level is peaking and he’s not sure he’s ready to simmer the quelling anger.

 

She reaches into the bags and one by one pulls out the items, draping them over the chairs around their table. Then she turns to him.

 

“I don’t think I found the right one.”

 

“What the hell were you looking for?”

 

Effie holds up a purple dress in one hand and a green dress in the other. Effie’s tiny but she’s tall. The dress would never fit her. “I bought these first. I think the purple just isn’t right. I liked it, but it just isn’t her. The green one looks like a tree.”

 

He glares at her. “What are you talking about?”

 

She sighs, her shoulders drop and she tosses the dresses back in their bags. She tosses the bags on the floor before reaching in and pulling out the carefully wrapped item from a J Crew bag. “What do you think of gold?”

 

“I think you’re supposed to wear black in mourning.”

 

“Not me,” she hisses. “They’re for Katniss!”

 

Haymitch blinks. “She’s dead.”

 

“I know!” Effie screams. “She still needs something to wear.”

 

He shakes his head. His wife has lost her mind. “We’re cremating her, remember? No one is going to see the goddamn outfit.”

 

“It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.” Effie turns around and reaches into the final bag. This dress is white and fluffy. “I liked this one. I thought it looked kind of like a bird, you know, or an angel. I like that – she’s flying.” She closes her eyes. “Or a wedding dress. That she’ll never wear.”

 

“She’d never wear it anyway.” Haymitch turns back to the TV. “And now she really won’t because she is dead.”

 

Effie storms by him, the dress clutched close to her chest. He thinks she calls him a pig as she passes but he’s not paying attention. The Mariner up to bat just hit a grand slam, putting them ahead. The ball flies through the air four or five times before the replays stop.

 

...

 

Fuck it.

 

The whiskey goes down smooth, better than the first drink, and Finnick can’t believe he’s never done this before. It’s not like he’s some goody-two-shoes – everyone in his hometown knows that. This shouldn’t bother him. He’s seen people drink before, seen them drunk, seen them so far passed gone that they were taken away in ambulances, but he himself has never been this bad.

 

Part of him knows that he thinks he’s better than everyone else because of it. Everyone else who parties hard and loud and long, turns out shitty and messed up because of who they are and what they grew up around. He has always laughed in their faces when they told him no. When people said kids like him don’t grow up to help people, to save people’s lives, he vowed to prove them wrong.

 

He picks up the newly filled glass. His vision blurs with the reality of what this means. The dark amber liquid swishes in the glass. If he takes this drink, that’s it. There’s no turning back tonight and maybe not ever because he likes not feeling. Every problem disappears off his shoulders. If he takes this drink and starts down this road, he may lose everything.

 

Is it worth it? How much does a human life cost?

 

He swirls the liquid in his glass. Binge drinking never appealed to him before, but now it is like a saving grace. He doesn’t have to think or feel or any of that. He’s never lost anyone before, no one that mattered. His parents are still alive, he still has all his grandparents.

 

Maybe he was never meant to be a doctor. How can he be a good doctor if he can’t even focus on his patients?

 

He’ll leave the doctoring to Dr. Abernathy, to Johanna, to Dr. Heavensbee and Dr. Chaff. They can handle everything. Hell, even Gloss Ritchson is a better doctor than him. At least patients don’t die on him.

 

He groans and for a moment blames Katniss. She didn’t look like she was dying, right up until the very end. They thought they were going to make it out of the surgery with flying colors. She just kept sneaking up on them.

 

He looks down at his drink. He’s ready to forget, but is he ready to forget it all? Does he really want to go down this road? Sometimes, it feels like the only choice.

 

Fuck it. The whiskey goes down smooth.

 

...

 

There should be a limit on the number of funerals one person is allowed to attend. At this rate, Haymitch will outlive every single member of his family. Prim’s the only one left and he hopes to whatever higher power people usually pray to that she manages to live longer than his sorry self.

 

The room is overflowing with people. They booked something small, nothing too outlandish. Katniss always kept to herself. Effie and Haymitch could count her friends on their fingers, or so they thought until the entire school seemed to show up in various displays of sadness. Not the fake sadness or the parents-forced-me-to-come kind either. Haymitch takes one look at Delly Cartwright, a girl who tearfully introduces herself as a classmate and admirer of Katniss’s, and realizes that the girl had no idea how popular she was – which is typical, he thinks. He can’t help but roll his eyes at Katniss’s incognizant perception of her actual reality. Of course she had no idea.

 

It makes this whole thing that much worse.

 

They burned her – which Effie keeps telling him not to say like that, but it’s true. The only remains of his niece that they have left are in an urn at the front of the room – ashes of the body picked apart to save lives of many other children. They took her corneas, her skin, her vital organs. The only one that remains among the ashes of bone and flesh is her heart, which kept beating until the very end.

 

He really wants a drink. He would give anything to leave this room of sobbing teenagers and head down to the bar. But Effie would kill him and as good of an alternative as that sounds, Plutarch just walked in the door and is signing the guestbook near the front door. If he books it now, that’s it. He’s going to get suspended for even longer.

 

So, he’ll manage it. He won’t crack in front of everyone here.

 

“Beautiful venue,” Plutarch says when he walks up, as if he’s commenting on a wedding and not a funeral.

 

“Yeah, I guess.”

 

“It’s awful, what brings people together,” Plutarch continues. He sighs and shakes his head. “I’m sure it will be a lovely ceremony.”

 

He’s not sure that he’s glad Plutarch didn’t ask how he was holding up like everyone else did or upset by how his boss focused on the flowers. Part of him wants to hug the man and part of him wants to shake him. _Look around you_ , he thinks, _my kid is dead._

 

The ceremony is a ceremony and so reminiscent of the ones he’s attended before. Prim, settled between him and Effie, grabs his hand midway through Psalm 23 and he grinds his teeth. Maybe too reminiscent. He’s brought back decades, when his sister did the same at their mother and brother’s funeral, at their father’s when they were barely old enough to remember, at their grandmother’s.

 

And he remembers Prim doing the same exact thing at her mother’s funeral, when she was barely old enough to remember, then situated between himself and her sister.

 

He looks down and frowns, wondering if this is the beginning of the end for her as well.

 

...

 

Peeta’s room has been oddly quiet all morning. The day he woke up, Johanna could barely make it through the day without going down to the gift shop to see if they had any earplugs. His mother spent most of the day berating him, asking why he thought it was such a good idea to go driving in the pouring rain. If Johanna never has to hear the woman’s shrill voice, it will be too soon.

 

Today, though, it’s too quiet. She peeks her head in just to make sure he hasn’t died on them. After all that work they did, he better not have.

 

Peeta sits propped up against his pillows, his eyes unfocused but looking at the television screen.

 

“Didn’t peg you as a _Peppa Pig_ fan,” she says.

 

He turns to her. “What?”

 

Johanna points to the screen. “ _Peppa Pig_. Kid’s television show.”

 

“Oh,” he says. “I wasn’t really watching.”

 

“Clearly,” she says. “Where are your folks?”

 

He paints a smile on his face. Paints is the only verb for it – it’s so fake he might as well not have bothered.

 

“My brother’s graduation. It was last weekend, but they’re having the party this weekend, so they’re preparing.”

 

“They left you here alone?”

 

He shrugs. “Not like they could take me with them.” He points at his lower half. “Considering I’m stuck here.”

 

“You’re doing really well.”

 

“Well?” he questions. “Dr. Mason, I can’t move my leg at all. I can’t even get up to go to the bathroom by myself. I wouldn’t call that well. The only good thing about being stuck here is that I didn’t have to go to the funeral for the girl I killed.”

 

He turns back to the television and turns the volume up. “My mother told me all about it though so I feel like I went,” he mumbles.

 

“Did you know her well?” Johanna kicks herself. “Well, duh, you were going to prom.”

 

Peeta keeps his eyes focused on the television, not answering. Johanna knows that being mad at him for his attitude is irrational. His life changed in an instant. One minute, he and Katniss were going to prom, the next he was walking up to a leg that would take weeks (or months, possibly years) to heal and a dead prom date. His father told her that he’s a really sweet kid. She’s having a hard time reconciling the sweet kid she imagined by his father’s stories with the moody jackass in the bed in front of her.

 

She hopes that the whole “treating every patient the same” nonsense comes with time. It’s so much easier to treat the nice ones, even though she realizes that the patients have a right to be bitchy.

 

He uses the remote to change the channel. Unfortunately, the peds floor only has access to certain channels so he’s stuck with few options. He settles for PBS, some documentary on insects it looks like, and drops the remote beside him. Then he tucks his chin in the neck hole of his gown so it covers his mouth and reaches his nose, crosses his arms, and proceeds to ignore her.

 

She shakes her head.

 

“Well, if you need anything, holler.”

 

His only response is lifting two fingers like a peace sign.

 

She groans and turns away. But, when she’s just out the door, she hears him call her back. She walks back in.

 

“What?”

 

“Just checking,” he sneers. “Wasn’t sure how loud I’d need to yell when I need you to come in and help me piss.”

 

Sweet kid her ass. Peeta Mellark is a monster.

 

...

 

“You stayed away longer than I thought you would,” Plutarch says, not looking up from the paper on his desk. “Two whole days after the funeral. I am actually a little impressed.”

 

Haymitch doesn’t move to enter the room, instead keeping his position in the doorway of Plutarch’s office. Something about the way Plutarch talks makes him tense.

 

But the feeling doesn’t come anywhere close to the nails-on-the-chalkboard tension he feels at home. If he hears Effie’s voice for five more minutes he might scream. He wants to be here. He needs to be here. He needs to forget about everything that is going on. The days between the death and the funeral are now nothing short of a blur of arrangements and he’s afraid if he gives himself too much time he’ll explode.

 

“I’m ready.”

 

Plutarch flips the page of what he’s reading and then finally looks up. “How are you, Haymitch?” he asks. When Haymitch goes to open his mouth, Plutarch cuts him off. “Don’t lie. How are you _really_?”

 

There are moments when the air leaves his lungs and his shoulders weigh with invisible bricks. But those moments often become overtaken by a deep thirst. He should go to a meeting, another thing that Effie has been nagging him about now that she doesn’t have a funeral to plan, a grave to pick.

 

“I’m managing.”

 

“You haven’t given yourself enough time to grieve.”

 

Haymitch grinds his teeth together before he speaks.

 

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Plutarch,” he hisses. “You have no idea what I can and can’t do. I know how to grieve. I’m an expert. Once you go to enough funerals, you don’t need a ton of time. You just want to get back to work.”

 

Plutarch blinks and clasps his hands over his papers. “All right. You can come back, but the first sign that you’re not ready I’m shipping you home.”

 

“Well, then, you’ll be seeing quite a bit of me,” Haymitch says. Then he turns around and walks out of the room. He wishes his hands would stop shaking.

 

...

 

It takes Finnick ten minutes to actually enter the auditorium. He has no desire to attend this week’s M&M. As an accredited teaching and academic hospital, PMH is required to hold regular Morbidity and Mortality conferences. The goal of these is to learn from complications and errors in a non-punitive environment. On a monthly basis, the department brings the doctors together to conduct a review of the complications and deaths that have occurred within their walls.

 

But today’s conference, with Finnick’s mistake right out in the open, he’s not sure if he’ll be able to focus long enough to learn anything.

 

“Alright, everyone, simmer down. We’re going to begin,” Dr. Heavensbee says. He logs into the computer at the podium and pulls up a presentation. _Panem Memorial Hospital, Morbidity and Mortality Conference,_ reads the first slide. He cuts to the second.

 

“Patient 2201312 died last month from a carotid dissection during emergency surgery. Dr. Coin will present.”

 

As Dr. Coin stands from her seat in the front row of the auditorium, Finnick swears he sees every doctor look at the one next to him. Everyone knows this case by now. Everyone knows it’s Katniss.

 

Dr. Coin looks unnervingly at the crowd. “Patient 2201312 presented asymptomatic to the ED after being involved in a MVA. EMTs at the scene determined no severe injury and patient was admitted and treated for shock. Upon final evaluation prior to discharge, patient presented with abnormal breath sounds, as well as nausea, fatigue, cephalagia, and mastoid ecchymosis. Patient was brought to radiology where hemopericardium and basiliar skull fracture were diagnosed through x-rays and CT scans.”

 

As she continues, she makes it sound so clinical. Presented, it holds none of the high stress emotion of the moment. Coin presents in her typical monotone, droning as if she has more important things to do than discuss a failure with a group of colleagues. But none of that matters. Finnick feels the familiar tightening in his chest and his hands begin to shake.

 

He wonders what was going through Katniss’s head in those final moments. Did she know anything of what was going on while she was under anesthesia? Even though she was unconscious, fully sedated by medication, did she see that infamous and controversial white light? Did images of her life flash before her closed eyes?

 

He can see them. Moments. A bow and arrow, getting on a plane from Boston to Seattle after her mother’s death. Prim giggling, a pink sky, a clash with Haymitch, Effie’s enthusiastic camera flashes as she prepared for a prom she never attended, the sound of rain in the streets. Then it’s over.

 

He stands quickly, wrapping his paper-thin white coat around himself as he battles a sudden chill. He excuses himself briefly as he shuffles by his colleagues, bumping knees and getting serious glares. But he can’t stop. He won’t stop until he’s out of this room.

 

All the doctors around him seem to be watching him. It might be a figment of his imagination, but he can feel their gazes and picture their whispers.

 

_It was his fault, you know, that the girl died. Oh, yeah, I heard it was his bad call when she was admitted._

_Rookie mistake as a fifth year – he’s lucky Heavensbee didn’t kick him right out of the program._

_Wait until the board hears; Snow’s always looking to gun people down, can’t have any bad PR, you know._

He walks faster.

 

Haymitch stands in his only exit and it makes Finnick pause for only a moment. He has successfully avoided his mentor for the few days that he’s been back and the last thing he was to do is ruin his streak. Haymitch is the last person he wants to see right now. So, he barrels right past him. It’s unprofessional, but at this point he’s not sure that makes any difference.

 

...

 

She is no longer on Dr. Chaff’s service, but she finds herself still invested in his patients. She never pegged herself for vascular or pediatrics, Chaff’s specialties, but she is. Much more so than watching from the very corner of the OR as Dr. Coin takes a patient off bypass. She can barely see what the doctor is doing, much less imagine herself doing it instead.

 

The door swings open and Dr. Chaff strides through. She turns away from Dr. Coin and he smiles at her.

 

“Hey, I thought I’d find you in here,” he says. He leans down to talk to her without disturbing the rest of the OR. “I’m going up to check on Peeta. The PT said he moved his toes this morning. Figured I’d see if you wanted to come, since you were there for the surgery.”

 

She nods and moments later she’s in an elevator with Dr. Chaff.

 

It’s not Peeta that she’s dying to see – far from it. The kid is a handful. But the case is impressive. She doesn’t know if she’ll see anything like it again during her residency. The fact that he’s moving his toes is a good sign. It means that their surgery (and the surgeries after to keep debriding) is working.

 

It’s incredible.

 

Chaff knocks on the door before entering.

 

“Peeta, by yourself today?”

 

The kid nods, but doesn’t say anything. So Chaff continues.

 

“I heard wonderful news. You moved your toes during PT – that’s great!”

 

Peeta turns to the surgeon. “ _That’s_ great.”

 

Johanna rolls her eyes. _Here we go_ , she thinks.

 

Chaff approaches the side of the bed and leans against the side table. “It’s going to be a long road ahead. It’s not going to be easy,” he says. “But, you’re doing remarkable, considering how you came in.”

 

“How I came in,” Peeta repeats, his eyes unfocused and staring at a wall. “I came in nearly dead. If we were triaged, I would have been the most severe, needing the most attention. And yet, here I am. Alive. Moving my toes – something you guys didn’t think would happen.”

 

Dr. Chaff nods. “That’s right. You’re exceeding our expectations.”

 

Peeta turns to Johanna and she finds herself taken aback by the lack of anything in his eyes. He looks tired, as if he hasn’t slept in weeks when she knows he has. He doesn’t do much else besides his PT and sleeping.

 

“I survived against all the odds.”

 

“You did,” Chaff says. He reaches for the chart at the end of the bed and makes a few ‘hmms’ before looking up. “Keep up the good work and we’ll have you up and out of here in no time.”

 

“Thanks, Dr. Chaff,” Peeta says quietly. Johanna fights back a scoff. Kid’s polite to him at least.

 

...

 

He misses bull’s eye.

 

His previous dart nearly took off the head of a pretty redhead at the table nearest the board. This one at least stuck. He sways a little, not sure how many tequila shots deep he is, and blinks a few times as he tries to focus on the board. It’s too blurry – he can’t make out anything more than a few overlapping circles.

 

He needs to sit down.

 

A spot at the bar is still open and he slides in, leaning his forearms against the wood to keep himself up. He’s pretty sure that he’s going to be sick. He has never been this drunk. He was already a few drinks in when a group of the residents showed up after a shift, ready to pull him into their games, and he continued after they disappeared into the night.

 

Across the bar, he sees Dr. Abernathy, sitting with his hands wrapped around his glass of water and lime. He thinks the man is following him. Everywhere he turns, there is Dr. Abernathy, like some sort of ghost. It isn’t like he doesn’t already have a ghost following him.

 

Any dark haired girl – braid, no-braid, ponytail, hair down, doesn’t matter – makes him double take. Especially tonight. He’s pretty sure Katniss is here at Sae’s bar too. She and Haymitch are trailing him.

 

He feels a hand on his shoulder and he jerks, but it’s not Katniss (of course it’s not). Instead it’s the nurse, _what’s her name?_ He can’t remember. The nurse from the ER the night Katniss died. The night he mistook her traumatic brain injury for shock.

 

“Finnick, are you alright?”

 

Words come out of his mouth but he’s not sure what they are or if they make any sense because her face looks concerned when he finishes talking. She sighs and gestures to the bartender, a regular named Darius who Finnick has gotten to know a little too well. Their families are actually from the same county in Ireland.

 

But before he can tell the nurse, they’re moving. Not far, just standing. He has two girls on either side of him – he must look like a stud.

 

Dr. Abernathy meets his eye for only a second before turning back to his water. Finnick doesn’t know how he does it – comes to a bar and orders water. Isn’t it tempting? He couldn’t do it. That’s for sure.

 

“Dr. Abernathy orders water?”

 

He nods his head and sighs as the cool outside air touches his skin. It was hot in the bar. “He’s an alcoholic,” he slurs. It’s not uncommon knowledge – he wonders why the nurse doesn’t know. “He doesn’t even drink at the staff Christmas party.”

 

He reaches around one of the girl’s heads to touch his nose but he can’t find it. His finger touches something, but it doesn’t seem to be his nose.

 

“Are you all set, Annie?”

 

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. You go. I got him.”

 

He is on a gurney. The room is dark with the curtains pulled but he knows this is the ER. The nurse is putting a needle in his arm. He jerks it back.

 

“I don’t do drugs.”

 

The nurse has a wonderful laugh.

 

“This is a banana bag. This is a miracle in IV form. You’re going to want this.”

 

He blinks. She sounds crazy to him, but something about her voice makes him trust her. So he gives her his right arm, keeping his left away.

 

“This is my good arm,” he says with a wink. She laughs again.

 

He might be able to listen to her laugh forever.

 

...

 

Finnick wakes up on a gurney in a vacant ER room, unsure of how he arrived there. There is an IV in his right arm, but no bracelet on his wrist to say he’s a patient. He looks around for a clue and nearly jumps when he notices the woman in the chair beside him – the nurse from the ER whose name he thinks he remembers is Annie. She is sleeping with her head on the gurney. His eyes fly to the clock on the wall. It’s nearly four in the morning.

 

As not to wake her, he slides out of the gurney on the other side. As his feet touch the ground, he pulls the IV out of his arm and applies a piece of gauze. Then, with one quick look back, he quietly leaves the room.

 

He doesn’t remember Annie last night and that scares him.

 

...

 

Johanna wanders into Peeta’s room. She knows she’s putting too much effort into his case. This isn’t going to help her in the long run. But she just knows that she needs to be there. And maybe it’s selfish of her, but so be it.

 

He’s sitting up in his bed, his pencil scribbling on the napkin that came with his lunch.

 

“You didn’t eat,” she says.

 

He doesn’t look up at her. “Would you eat that shit?”

 

She rolls her eyes. “Language. We’re on the peds floor.”

 

“My apologies,” he mutters. Then he looks up at her with a blank face. “Would you eat that crap?”

 

She has to admit, while PMH has a decent cafeteria by hospital standards, the plate he received looks only vaguely appetizing. She shakes her head and he looks back down at the napkin on his tray table. She looks down as well.

 

“That’s really good,” she says.

 

“Thanks,” he mutters as he adds a few freckles to the nose bridge of the girl he’s drawing. The girl looks familiar and it takes Johanna a few minutes to recognize her.

 

“Have you talked to anyone?” she asks. She nods down to his napkin drawing. “About what happened?”

 

He shakes his head. “Not much to say. I was driving and I should have died. But I didn’t and she did. The end.”

 

“Hey,” Johanna says, shaking her head. “It’s not your fault.”

 

He looks up at her and smiles sadly.

 

“Dr. Mason, thank you, but it is.” He fiddles with his pencil. “I’m responsible for the people in my car, right?”

 

He gives her a closed-lipped smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “You have other patients. You should go help them.”

 

She nods and walks away. But she looks back quickly when she reaches the doorway. He leans against the pillows and sighs, his eyes going to the window. He looks so pitiful that she almost wishes she hadn’t looked back.

 

...

 

He hasn’t sat in the cafeteria to eat his lunch in years. Most of the fifth year residents use a conference room for their break, with a singular table that fits them all with easy access to their patients if their pagers go off suddenly. Sitting with his friends hasn’t held much appeal lately. For his last few shifts, he’s skipped his breaks entirely, sustaining himself on Clif bars and snacks from the vending machines. He’s particularly hungry today and ran out of granola bars yesterday, which brings him here.

 

He stuffs a forkful into his mouth and closes his eyes. His fellow residents don’t understand, even though they think they do. They’ve tried to tell him stories about patients they’ve lost, but it’s not the same. He knew Katniss. He watched her grow up right in front of his eyes throughout his residency. Knowing that he was involved in her death – it’s unimaginable. His heart has broken and he’s not sure there is anything he can do to fix it.

 

On top of that, Dr. Abernathy seems to be making it his life’s purpose to follow him. Any surgery, any patient, there he is. He’s always paging Finnick, always insisting Finnick join him on a case. Finnick wants nothing less than to forget everything, but how can he when his mentor is Haymitch Abernathy? It’s why he’s making his nightly appearances at Sae’s. He has never spent so much on alcohol in his entire life.

 

He’s hungover today and Abernathy noticed. Of course he did. He can probably smell the alcohol on him, oversensitive to it after his own years of abuse. The older surgeon said nothing, but he didn’t have to – the look in his eyes said enough.

 

But, to be honest, Finnick doesn’t really care. Heavensbee could kick him out of the program right now and he’d be fine. In fact, he might like that.

 

“Anyone sitting there?”

 

Finnick looks up and shakes his head. Annie smiles before taking the seat across from him at the small table. She opens her drink and takes a sip.

 

“How are you doing?”

 

He shrugs and looks down into his food. Annie has seen him at his worse and it’s not something that makes him proud. He barely knows Annie.

 

“It’s just that I haven’t gotten a chance to talk to you since–”

 

He cuts her off. “I’m okay. Really. That was...a bad night.”

 

She nods and smiles, turning back to her plate. They eat for a moment in silence before she looks back up. “I’m sorry if this is out of line, but...I, uh, I go to a grief group. It meets on Tuesday nights. If you want to come,” she says. She shrugs at his blank stare. “I lost a patient a few years ago that meant a lot to me. High school boyfriend came in after crashing his motorcycle. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he was basically decapitated. Wasn’t much we could do.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

She shakes her head. “I just, I wanted you to know that you’re not alone in what you’re going through. You don’t have to be alone.”

 

His pager shrills from the waistband of his scrubs and he takes a peek. He’s needed for a consult in the ED. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

 

As he clears his tray, Annie nods. “The offer stands. When you’re ready.”

 

He gives her a tense smile before turning away and leaving her without an answer.

 

...

 

Johanna becomes a first year resident. It’s hard to believe. Around her are all these little interns and sometimes she forgets that she’s not still one of them. That she has a leg up on them. She’s one year into a five-year residency and it just doesn’t seem real.

 

Her pager shrills. She’s eating a late lunch as she carries a specimen to the lab. Not the most hygienic, but she’s starving and if she doesn’t eat now, she’ll have to skip lunch all together. She has been running around all day and she’s so done. She’s been on-call all week and tonight starts her first of a three day stretch where she’s off. She’s never been so excited.

 

Johanna’s halfway to the lab when her pager goes off. She curses and looks down to see what it is. It’s not a 911, so she ignores it, continuing down to the lab. She’s dropping the specimen off when it beeps again – this time it is 911.

 

She sprints to the elevator, pushes people out of the way so she’s the only one on it and holds the door closed button until she reaches her destination. The pediatric floor is on 7 North and, of course, she’s in the South elevator. She sprints again, out of the elevator, through the bridge that crosses the atrium into the North section of the hospital, until she reaches her destination.

 

The intern on Chaff’s service looks ready to pee his pants.

 

“You were the one in on this case, right?” he asks when Johanna arrives.

 

“What happened?”

 

The two walk through the door and Johanna stands still for a moment. Peeta is crumpled on the ground, banging his hands on the tiles, screaming.

 

“What the hell happened?” Johanna shouts at the intern.

 

The intern holds his hands up. “I don’t know. I just heard him screaming and I didn’t want to call psych but he won’t stop.”

 

“Well, you could have picked him up off the ground!” Johanna screams. She shakes her head. “Just leave!”

 

The intern scurries away and Johanna reaches down. She uses her strength to hoist Peeta up. He’s a thick kid – not fat but muscular – and she’s just barely strong enough to lift his dead weight.

 

She sits him on the edge of the bed and waits until he shuts his mouth.

 

“What happened?”

 

He looks down at the ground and shakes his head.

 

“Peeta, I need to know what happened so I can examine you and make sure you didn’t do anything to hurt yourself.”

 

“No!” he shouts. “You’re not helping me anymore. You should have just let me die in the first place!”

 

She wants to smack the kid and it takes every remaining ounce of energy not to do it.

 

“Are you kidding? After everything that Dr. Chaff did to help you and you’re saying you want to die?” Johanna says. “That’s not how you thank a doctor.”

 

He looks up at her and shakes his head. “I was supposed to die, not her.”

 

“Look, we can’t change that now,” Johanna says. “So, what did you do?”

 

He looks up at her tearfully. “I just wanted to grab something out of my bag and I didn’t want to call a nurse,” he says. “I fell, okay?”

 

“You’re not supposed to be walking by yourself!” she hisses at him. “Your leg isn’t up to that kind of pressure.”

 

“I know that!”

 

“So why did you do it?”

 

“Because I’m sick of feeling helpless!”

 

Johanna sighs. “Okay, I can get behind that.”

 

“You can?” He sounds surprised. As if it hasn’t dawned on him that his doctors understand that he’s frustrated by the lack of progress. All his doctors praise him for how far he’s come and – what, he can move his toes?

 

“Yeah, I can,” she says, sitting beside him. “It sucks. I know. But, you fall and hit something the wrong way, all this is for nothing. So, why don’t you take it easy, as hard as that is so I don’t have to come in here and kick your butt. Got it?”

 

He sighs. “Got it.”

 

“Alright,” she says, jumping off the bed. She grabs his bag and puts it next to him. “Keep that in reach next time.”

 

He nods.

 

...

 

The yelling hits his ears as soon as the elevator doors open. He closes his eyes for just a moment, preparing himself, before striding through the hallway. The air flicks the end of his white coat behind him, making him look more menacing than he thinks he could be. Plutarch may be the Chief of Surgery, but sometimes he thinks his doctors don’t take him seriously, not as seriously as they took his predecessor. Certain doctors definitely don’t.

 

Doctors like Haymitch Abernathy.

 

“I need a different OR.”

 

“I’m sorry, Dr. Abernathy, but OR 3 is the only one open.” The intern looks about ready to start sobbing and Plutarch shakes his head. He knew this was coming, even if Haymitch didn’t himself.

 

“Haymitch,” he says, cutting off his top neurosurgeon before he starts shouting again.

 

The doctor turns and points to the OR board. “I can’t operate in OR 3.”

 

He sighs and shakes his head. “Haymitch.”

 

“I am the head of the division and I have a girl in the ED with an open head wound that I need to fix,” Haymitch insists. “And I can’t fix it in OR 3.”

 

“Why not?”

 

Haymitch blinks and doesn’t say a word. Plutarch just stares at him. It has taken longer than he figured it would, but he knows that Haymitch has no real reason for the request. OR 3 is no different from any of the others. It has the same equipment and works just as well. It’s just that Haymitch has successfully avoided operating in OR 3 for the last couple of months.

 

He walks closer to Haymitch and talks quietly, so the gossipy ears of his staff can’t hear. “You’re making a scene.”

 

“I’m not operating in OR 3.”

 

“Okay,” Plutarch says. He turns to the intern still standing fearfully behind Dr. Abernathy. “Page Dr. Donner. She’s needed in OR 3.”

 

“Right away, sir.”

 

“Plutarch–”

 

He shakes his head and holds up a hand before Haymitch can say another word. “No. Maysilee will take this case unless you can look me in the eye and tell me that the reason you can’t operate in OR 3 has nothing to do with the fact that Katniss’s organ harvest was in OR 3.”

 

Haymitch glares at him, his nostrils flaring. “You have no right,” he hisses.

 

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

 

When Haymitch says nothing, Plutarch knows he’s right. Haymitch may believe himself immune to the horrors of grief, but he knows that’s not true. Like any other human, he would break at some point. Humans are fickle, stupid beings – no denial in the world can save you from grief.

 

“Go home. Take a break. Feel.”

 

“I’m. Fine.” He says it through his teeth. “It’s managed.”

 

“Haymitch, you’re not supposed to be managing it, you’re supposed to feel it. Feel it so you can move forward. Managing it just bottles it up until the pressure makes you explode.”

 

“I’m managing it!” Haymitch says, this time louder, not caring who around him hears. “I know what I’m doing!”

 

He shakes his head. “Katniss is at peace. You need to find yours. Until then, I want you out of this hospital on administrative leave. You can practice again once you’re cleared by occupational health’s psychiatrist.”

 

“You think I’m crazy?”

 

Plutarch shakes his head. “No. I think you’re grieving and you’ve never let yourself do it before, so you don’t know what to do.” He puts his hands on the younger doctor’s shoulders. “Even if it’s just the weekend, go home. Let yourself grieve. You’ve always masked the grief with drinking or working. Take the time you need this time. Trust me.”

 

The elevator door dings and Dr. Donner walks out. Before she can even ask where she’s needed, Haymitch turns on his heel and storms by her, nearly knocking her over. He presses a button on the elevator and keeps a glare on Plutarch as the doors shut.

 

“What happened?” Maysilee asks.

 

Plutarch looks at her and gives a sad smile. “He felt it and he didn’t want to.” He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Now, you’re needed in OR 3. There’s a girl coming up from the ED...”

 

...

 

She’s just finishing up rounds when she hears a loud crash. Today is the first day that she is off Chaff’s rotation again and onto another. She’s on the pediatric floor and something in the pit of her gut tells her that the crash is coming from Peeta. The kid – with his curly blond hair and his bright blue eyes and his sorry sob story – has someway weaseled his way into her very guarded heart.

 

She told herself that she would never care this way again, especially not for a patient that could up and die on her.

 

Johanna arrives to the room just as an orderly runs out. The plastic disk the hospital serves lunch in is upside-down on the floor – mashed potatoes and a fairly decent chuck of chicken have clumped on the floor with corn sprinkling the tiles like glitter. Peeta’s arms are crossed as he looks out the window.

 

“You know that if you keep refusing food like this Dr. Chaff is just going to order a feeding tube for you,” she says. He doesn’t respond and instead keeps huffing. “I dunno about you but I’d rather swallow a chicken leg I don’t want than have a tube down my nose.”

 

“I should have stopped her.”

 

She sighs. Of course it’s Katniss. It’s always Katniss. This kid doesn’t seem to think about anything else. He and Finnick can form a group – the ‘I think I killed Katniss Everdeen’ support group. But, rather than hedge the subject, she just comes over and sits down on the edge of the bed.

 

It’s something she wishes someone had done for her when her family died. Maybe if they had she wouldn’t walk around so guarded, filled with so much guilt and anger that manifests itself in a savior-of-the-helpless act. Honestly, she makes a sucky doctor. Her hands are nimble but her attitude...

 

She shakes her head and turns her attention back to the kid. Maybe she can get him to open up. God knows he could use an outlet.

 

“Stopped her from what?”

 

He shakes his head and looks away.

 

“Look, it was an accident and blaming yourself–”

 

“I was just so focused on the fact that I got to take her to prom. Me,” he says, still staring out the window. “I have no self control around her so when she tells me to drive, drive anywhere, I...I drive.”

 

His face scrunches together and Johanna recognizes it instantly. He grinds his teeth together and screws his eyes shut. He’s trying so desperately not to feel what he’s feeling. Anger. Sadness. Fear. Grief. He’s trying not to grieve.

 

It’s unprofessional, but she sits down on his bed and grabs his hands in her own. “No,” she snaps. “Don’t repress it. It’ll just make it worse.”

 

She wishes for a moment that she had a softer voice. Instead, her gruff voice has a stiff dichotomy to the gentle action of taking his hands.

 

He keeps his eyes squeezed shut.

 

“What you’re feeling is normal. You can be angry. You can be sad.”

 

When he finally opens his mouth after what seems like hours of silence between them, his voice is shaky.

 

“She’s dead, Dr. Mason.”

 

This is worse than torture. She’s pretty sure she’d rather be water boarded. As he falls apart in front of her, gasping for air between sobs, she has to close her eyes. She knows the feeling – the revelation that comes only with time. When her family died, it took months for it to sink in. And when it did, the pain was worse than the day she found out.

 

She’s not a touchy person by nature, but the kid loses it and somehow she finds him in her arms, his face tucked into her shoulder, water slowly seeping through her scrub shirt.

 

Time stops for a moment as Peeta sobs and Johanna closes her eyes. She remembers sitting in the waiting room as each doctor came out and told her the outcomes. Her mother died. Her father died. Her brother and sister. No one was left. No one except for her. At sixteen, that was it. She was entirely alone in the world.

 

While she’s sitting there, rubbing her patient’s back, she catches the eyes of the chief through the doorway. He stops and stares for a few moments before walking in and crossing his arms.

 

“Dr. Mason, can I have a word in the hallway, please?”

 

She nods and pushes Peeta away. He leans back into his pillows, eyes red and puffy, and then turns to the window. Once she’s satisfied that he’ll be okay for a few moments, she stands and follows the chief out the door.

 

“Dr. Mason.” The chief runs his hand over his face. “You’re a surgeon, not a therapist.”

 

She throws her hand in the direction of Peeta’s door. “That kid has no one. You want to know how often his parents come around? I think I’ve seen them once!”

 

“And as unfortunate as that is, it’s not your concern,” he says. “That is when you page a social worker. You are not trained–”

 

“I’m sorry, Dr. Heavensbee, but that kid in there is my patient,” Johanna says. “I know the sound of his screams. I know that when he smiles and actually means it he has these little dimples in his cheeks. And I know that this kid will never talk to a social worker the way you want him to. He doesn’t trust anyone here and now that I’ve just earned his trust you want me to turn him to the wolves.”

 

“It’s not your job.”

 

She looks down at her watch. “Well, then, it’s a good thing my shift ended ten minutes ago.”

 

She gives him a smirk and walks right back into the room.

 

...

 

The kid is there. Again.

 

Haymitch clenches his hands into fists and storms through a group of fraternity brothers celebrating a bachelor until he’s at the bar. He reaches the empty stool beside the kid and takes a seat, takes a whiff.

 

“You smell like a distillery, Odair, and it’s not becoming.”

 

Finnick looks up from his beer bottle and side-eyes Haymitch. “You’re not the boss of me anymore,” he says.

 

“Yeah, about that,” he says, as the bartender, Darius, sets his usual down in front of him. “Not happening. I’ll see you on Monday morning.”

 

He hadn’t been all that surprised when Plutarch had stopped him in the hallway earlier today, telling him that Finnick had quit and all but forced him to follow their resident out. Plutarch had all but begged him to make Finnick reconsider what would ultimately be the worst decision of his life. Haymitch had only done it because he knew that as overdramatic as Plutarch can be this was not one of those times. Finnick was drinking himself into oblivion and Haymitch knew that Plutarch was right – if they didn’t stop him, he’d lose everything.

 

Like he had.

 

Finnick glares at him and shakes his head. “You should be glad to get rid of me. I killed her. It’s my fault.”

 

Haymitch takes a long gulp and then laughs. “You’re letting it win.”

 

“What win?”

 

“Death.” He turns and nudges Finnick so they’re looking at each other face-to-face. “You don’t quit because someone dies. That defeats the purpose of being a doctor.”

 

“It was my mistake that killed her.”

 

“No. It wasn’t. It was a CVA.”

 

“That’s a company line.”

 

“Hey – you don’t get to talk to me like this,” Haymitch sneers back in the same fashion as he got sneered at just moments ago. “Fine, you don’t want to talk to me as your boss. Well, then, you get to talk to me as the family of the kid you ‘killed’ by not diagnosing something that wasn’t symptomatic and didn’t end up killing her in the end.”

 

“What’s your problem?”

 

“My problem is that you’re going to spend what would have been the rest of Katniss’s life sulking and moping and drinking. Look, I’ve been drunk and you’re not a drunk.” Haymitch reaches for the beer bottle and slides it down the bar, out of Finnick’s reach. It ends up stopping in front of a college student who picks it up, thinking it’s his. “Pick a vice less detrimental to your career. As a doctor, I can’t condone smoking cigarettes, but how about jaywalking – nah, knowing you, you’ll get run over.”

 

“Haymitch, what the hell?”

 

“I’m not letting you ruin your career,” he says. “Especially over something that you’ve blown so out of proportion.”

 

“Katniss is dead,” Finnick hisses.

 

“Damn straight,” Haymitch says. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t walk by her bedroom everyday and look in to see if she’s in the covers – maybe it’s all a bad dream? How about the time I found Prim in there and really did think these last few months have all just been a nightmare that I finally woke up from? Huh? You think I don’t know that Katniss is dead?”

 

Finnick looks down embarrassed.

 

“And lets say you did play a role in her dying – hypothetically. For every mistake you make, there are hundreds of thousands of things you do right. There is a reason why your name isn’t the one on the chart. You’re a resident. You operate under an attending. You’re learning. And you will make mistakes. And it’s okay – only if you learn from it and don’t let it happen with the next one.” Haymitch takes another drink. “But, you’re quitting. So, every mistake you made with my kid isn’t going to get fixed. And that pisses me off.”

 

“So you want me to go to Dr. Heavensbee and demand to get my job back.”

 

Haymitch nods. “Plutarch’s still in his office. He’s expecting you.”

 

“You’re a fucking con artist, Abernathy.”

 

“By Monday morning that mouth better be washed with soap. We’ve got three peds follow-up patients whose parents are not going to appreciate that potty mouth.”

 

Finnick turns away from him and slides off the bar stool. He doesn’t say where he’s going but Haymitch knows. Finnick’s predictable. He’s a good one. He might have fallen off the wagon for a bit, but he wants to do right. He’ll talk to Plutarch. He’ll be on Haymitch’s service again on Monday.

 

Which is good, because Haymitch is going to need all the help he can get.

 

He looks out at the crowd forming at the bar. There are so many residents and fellows here and it brings him back to his days as a young doctor. Not a care in the world. Bragging to the others that he got to watch a certain procedure. That he got to hold a clamp. That he got to close. Progressing further to actually being able to assist. They’re all the same – wide-eyed and full of hope. The world hasn’t gotten them down.

 

He picks up his glass and drains it, setting it down next to two identical glasses that he’s pretty sure should have been picked up already. The ice in the first one is melting and the lime is submerged in the melted remains of the cubes.

 

“Another, Dr. Abernathy, or are you all set?” Darius asks.

 

“I think I’m alright.”

 

Darius nods and begins to clear the glasses. “You heading back to the hospital or is Effie waiting for you.”

 

Effie. Hospital. He’s thinking that maybe he should go to the hospital. He enjoys the quiet of the on-call room for sleeping. He doesn’t get good rest at home anymore. But Effie will kill him if he sleeps at the hospital again. He tells it to Darius, who nods and holds out his hand.

 

Haymitch reaches into his pocket and hands the young bartender his keys.

 

...

_Finnick did not panic. Ever._

_It was one of his strengths that he wrote about in essays, exampled in interviews. He was calm under pressure, something greatly beneficial to a surgeon. With machines squealing and shrieking around him, his hands would be steady. It's what he told Dr. Flickerman, the Director of the Residency Program, during his interview with Panem Memorial Hospital. Dr. Flickerman, an attending plastic surgeon who looked like he had experimented on himself a few times as his smile never waned, had seemed impressed by his answer when coupled with the examples he had given._

_So, to be honest, Finnick was thrilled that he would probably never see Dr. Caesar Flickerman ever again because the man would think that Finnick was nothing less than a con._

_"You're sweating," Prim said._

_He turned his head and nearly smacked his nose into Prim's. She bounced in his arms as he ducked through hallways, poking his head in exam rooms, but this is the first she had said since he acquired her as his duty-of-the-day. She weighed next to nothing, a waif of a little girl, and he had nearly forgotten he was carrying her._

_  
Nearly. Because if he didn't find her sister, he was not going to be a doctor. He was going to be an unemployed owner of two very expensive letters behind his name that were useless without a residency._

_He had turned his back for maybe five seconds when he went to a storage closet to find a measuring cup for Prim's medicine when he couldn't find one in their bag. The next thing he knew Prim stood alone in the hallway and Katniss was gone._

_"So are you," he said back, sighing. There couldn't be that many hiding spots in the hospital, could there?_

_"I'm sick. Are you sick?"_

_Another on-call room empty. He groaned and re-shut the door._

_"You really didn't see where she went?" he asked._

_Prim shook her head. "She was there and then she wasn't. Maybe she got runover by those people wheeling the giant bed down the hallway."_

_"You mean a gurney," Finnick corrected. Then he blinked. "Wait, what gurney?"_

_Prim shrugged. "There were a lot of people running. There was someone sitting on this guy's chest. They were running and then they were gone. And so was Katniss." Prim taps her finger to her lip. "Maybe she followed them. Nah, she doesn't like blood."_

_"She doesn't like blood?"_

_Prim giggled. "If there had been a blanket she could hide in, that's where she'd be. Hiding."_

_After that, he started to take an extra careful look when he opened doors, but the kid had turned into an enigma. He was nearly ready to have her paged - ready to endure Abernathy's wrath and all – when he spotted the tips of a pair of pink sneakers sticking out from behind an empty bed along an empty hallway. He put Prim on the ground, instructed her not to move an inch to which she playfully pretended to freeze, and walked over to the sneakers, bending down._

_There she was._

_"What are you doing under there, little miss runaway?"_

_Her arms were wrapped around her knees, her chin pressed to her chest. Nothing reacted to his voice. Her eyes starred straight ahead, dazed and unchanged. Finnick reached out to tap the toe of her shoe and she sucked in a breath, her eyes going wide._

_"Hey, it's okay. What's wrong?"_

_She blinked and looked at him, her pupils wide._

_"Why were they pressing on his chest?"_

_Finnick let out a breath. "Well, his heart probably stopped beating on their way to the OR, so they're keeping the blood circulating until they can get him to the paddles," he said, not sure exactly what the girls saw._

_"My mom's heart stopped beating, but they didn't press on her chest like that. They just said she died."_

_"I thought your dad said your mom was out of town."_

_"Effie and Haymitch are my aunt and uncle, not my mom and dad. My mom died right in front of me and no one banged on her chest like that. Was I supposed to?"_

_His classmates were down in the gallery of ORs watching surgery, reading through patient charts, and learning how to be a doctor. Finnick did not sign up for this. What was he supposed to say? He didn't even know how her mom died - a car accident, a heart attack, cancer? Endless possibilities presented in front of him, but what was he supposed to do with them?_

_"Sometimes people just die, Katniss, and as much as we try to save them, we just can't." He looked up at her forehead. "Come on, kid, you're bleeding. Let's get you mended before Haymitch comes back and thinks I tried to do you in."_

_He set the girls up in a vacant stall in the ER, one right next to the other. Prim got a mouthful of her medicine, a little overdue, and Katniss's forehead scrape happened to be just a tad too deep for a bandage. As he readied the supplies, he wondered if maybe he should get a real doctor in here to do the stitches so when his boss came to find them later in the day he could at least say he did that right. But, his vanity won out over that. If he was going to go down in history as the intern fired on the first day, at the very least he wanted to do the two sutures that were going to end his career._

_"You're a nice doctor, Finnick," Prim said, leaning back on her hands and swinging her feet off the edge of the exam table._

_"I'm not a doctor yet, Prim. Not really. Your uncle's going to teach me."_

_"You're going to be a head doctor!" Prim squealed. Then she pointed to Katniss's forehead. "And you're fixing Katniss's head right now."_

_He decided not to correct her, figuring she was too young to understand. Instead, he focused on making the two sutures the prettiest he'd ever done._

_"You shouldn't even have that big of a scar," he said. Katniss smiled._

_He stood from his stool. "Alrighty, girls, let's get out of here. I think I saw some board games hanging around the breakroom while Prim and I were on our manhunt. Why don't we find one?"_

_Prim leaped into his arms and gave him a broad grin. "I want Candyland!"_

_Finnick winced. "I don't think they had that one, but we might be able to find a chessboard or maybe if we're lucky some Chutes and Ladders." Prim wrinkled her nose at the suggestions, but didn't object._

_They entered the elevator and Katniss glanced at herself in the mirrored finish of the elevator doors, gingerly touching the bandage covering her stitches as she did so._

_"On a scale of you're fine to you're fired, how upset is your uncle going to be?"_

_Katniss turned to him, her face showing her deeply in thought. "I think Haymitch is going to like you." She shrugged and turned away. "And if he's mad, I'll tell the truth and he'll be mad at me, not you."_

_The elevator doors dinged and the three stepped off._

**Author's Note:**

> Gloss, Brutus, Cato, Thresh, and Rue all have the last name of their actors. I chose to give Chaff and Seeder first names that I thought were a little more in-line with the given names of the characters than that of their actors – I just thought Roger and Maria sounded a tad too common amongst Haymitch and Finnick. Maren Hawes, the patient at the beginning, can be seen as the District 4 tribute in Katniss’s games, or she can just be an extra.
> 
> I am not a doctor and definitely not a surgeon. I’ve just watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy and ER. Thus, Katniss and Peeta’s medical conditions are taken from Grey’s so I could at least try to get it right. Peeta is a play on Clara Ferguson from season 6. Katniss is taken from Holly Anderson in season 5.
> 
> When Finnick explains the reasons behind Katniss’s death, that is almost verbatim from the speech Dr. Dixon gave during the Holly Anderson episode. I did not feel confident enough in my abilities to paraphrase too much without getting something wrong.
> 
> Haymitch’s speech to Plutarch about his “options” also stems from Grey’s – this time from season 11, episode 21. Grey’s fans will recognize this from Meredith. I suppose writing this was cathartic for me – I am still bitter about the way Shonda chose to kill off Derek. It’s one of the very few mistakes I think she’s made thus far...but I digress.
> 
> An Easter Egg for Grey’s fans: the doctor coming to get the lungs for Grey-Sloan’s patient Cato is Dr. Alex Karev. He brought along intern Isaac Cross who I’ve thought looked like he could be a Mellark cousin of some sort since his first episode.
> 
> Seneca Crane’s speech to the interns during Finnick’s first flashback is paraphrased from Grey’s. It’s the same speech Dr. Webber gives the interns every year. This is what originally fueled me into making a Grey’s/THG crossover – “your arena”, it was asking to be written.
> 
> That being said, I changed it up to better portray Neuro versus General. After doing some research, I learned that neurosurgeons do not need to do a general surgery residency and thus this is a major change from Grey’s Anatomy. 
> 
> The final scene with Haymitch is inspired by a scene in season 6, episode 9 “New History” which I thought was particularly powerful on the show.
> 
> I think that’s all.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> Big thank you to Abbie for being my cheerleader with this.
> 
> Now off to finish my WIPs.


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